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

Early Christian Arabic texts 35914 Early Christian Arabic textsEvidence for non- 'Uthmanic Qur' ancodices, or early approaches tothe Qur'an? 1Clare WildeAccording to normative Islamic tradition, even though God's speech - God' ·word- is not constrained to the mu~baf(the ink and paper of the individual Qur'codices), or even to the discrete revelations to Mul;!ammad, the text of theQur'an- as opposed to earlier scriptures- is understood to preserve an uncor~rupted form of revelation. This claim, however, has a number of nuances: it is not·the vocalized (i.e. the consonantal Arabic containing the distinguishing "a", "i" or· .."u" vowel markers), nor even the fully elaborated consonantal script (in which,for example, "b", "t", "th", "n" and 'Y' are distinguished by the placement andnumber of dots above or below the basic letter form), but the base form of theArabic script (rasm), with an accepted variety of reading traditions (qirli 'lit), ascollected, codified and distributed by the third caliph, 'Uthman, that preserves themessage revealed to Mul;!ammad through the agency of the angel Gabriel. While ·the orthography of, and discrepancies in, early Qur'an manuscripts have been thesubject of scholarly examination/ Alan Jones (among others) has argued convinc- ·ingly3 that the earliest written forms of the Qur'an served as an aide memoire forreciters of an already-memorized text; it was only when non-Arabic speakerscame under Arab rule, an,d began to adopt Islam, that the highly ·elaboratedform of the text (with all vowels and consonants clearly delineated) became ·•necessary.Although the so-called "'Uthmanic codex" is now understood to preserve theinimitable Word of God as revealed to the Prophet Mul;!ammad, should contemporaryapproaches to the Qur'an be taken as representative of those of the earlyMuslim community? As, for much of the first five centuries after the death of theProphet, Christians were a significant demographic in much of the Arabic-speaking,I My thanks to Gabriel Said Reynolds and the participants at the 2009 Notre Dame Qur'an conferencefor their helpful comments on my paper. They are not, however, responsible for any mistakescontained herein.2 Fore1tample, G. Puin's work on the Qur'an manuscript cache uncovereq in :San'a', and D. Power'sdiscussion of the term "kaliila" in Q 4:12, 176. See the EQ article ofF. Deroche, "Manuscripts of •.the Qur'an," 3:254-75, and D. Powers' "Inheritance," 2:518-26, for an introductory overview of·these themes.3 See his EQ article "Orality and writing in Arabia," 3:587-93.Muslim· ruled world, ~nd as Christian Arabic texts would not have been subject todictates of "nonriative" Islam, what might the various "approaches" to thefound in Christian Arabic texts tell us of the variety and nature of such_trends within contemporaneous Muslim communities? 4.. The Christian Arabic texts under examination hereChristian Arabic texts from the early Abbasid period are the focus of theexamination: a unique manuscript (Sinai Ar. 434) from the second/eigth totrm..tl->lt.,.ntl-> centuries, attributed to an anonymous monk in Jerusalem, 5 and IgnaceDick's edition of Theodore Abii Qurra's debate with Muslim notables in theinajlis of al-Ma' miin (r. 198/813-218/833). 6 Despite the discrepancy in their tones· and their estimations of "Islam," they each have as a premise communicationbetween Christians and Muslims, and they each demonstrate an intimate knowledgeof, and interest in, Christianity and Islam, on the part of the interlocutors,both Christian and Muslim.·. Approaching the Qur'an 7As with many pre-modern cultures, priority was given in Islamic tradition tomemorization and recitation, rather than the "reading" of a written text - a trendthat continues today, in "Qur'an recitation contests" from the Arab heartlandsof Islamic civilization to Southeast Asia. The Qur'a:nic allusions to dhikr mayreflect awareness of this emphasis on recitation and recollection of sacred texts in4 For one e1tample of the early interaction between Christian and Muslim theologians, seeM. Cook,"The origins of kaliim," BSOAS 43, 1980, 32-43, in whose opening sentence he asserts that it is"no secret" that "the dialectical technique of Muslim kaliim is a ·borrowing from Christiantheology." Cook purports to bring to "the notice of Islamicists a Syriac theological te1tt whichprovides a sustained and close parallel to the dialectical style" of an anti-Qadarite tract ascribed toal-I.lasan b. Mui)ammad al-I.Ianafiyya.5 R. Haddad, La TTCinite divine chez les theologiens arabes 750-1050, Paris: Beauchesne, 1985, 38,dates the te1tt to 780 CE ( cf. R. Hoyland, Seeing Islam as others saw it: A survey and evaluation ofChristian, Jewish and Zoroastrian writings on early Islam, Princeton: Darwin Press, 1997, 504-5).A ninth-century date is suggested by M. Swanson, "Beyond proofte1tting: Approaches tothe Qur'iin in some early Arabic Christian apologies," The Muslim World 88, 1988, (297-319)301, n. 25.6 I. Dick (ed.), La discussion d'Abii Qurra avec les utemas musulmqns devant le calife al-Ma 'mzin,Aleppo: n.p., 1999. Twenty-silt manuscripts of the te1tt, dating from the eighth/fourteenth to thethirteenth/nineteenth centuries, and in two recensions (Melkite and Jacobite), are known. For themanuscript history of the te1tt and the larger genre of debate literature, see S. Griffith, "The monkin the emir's majlis: Reflections on a popular genre of Christian literary apologetics in Arabic inthe early Islamic period," in H. Lazarus-Yafeh et al. ( eds), The Majlis: Interreligious Encountersin Medieval Islam, Wiesbaden: Harrossowitz, 1999, (13-65) 38-39. On the historicity of theencounter between Abii Qurra and· al-Ma'miin, see idem, "Reflections on the biography ofTheodore Abii Qurrah," Parole de /'Orient 18, 1993, (143-70) 156-58.7 SeeM. Sells' book of this title: Approaching the Qur'iin: The Early Revelations (Ashland, OR:White Cloud Press, 1999) for an overview of understandings of the Qur'iin in Islamic tradition.