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

378 Gerald HawtingAngels act as messengers of God, they support the divine throne and praisewithout cease, they protect nations and individuals, they guard hell, call the . .·from the body when the time arrives, they record God's decrees, etc. Other idea{relating to them, however, appear less usual. ·· ·As well as expecting messengers of God to be angels, the Qur'iin tells us thatthose opponents whom it consistently calls mushrilain thought that angelsintercede for them with God, that they regarded angels as God's offspring,in effect that they worshipped angels as gods. The Qur' an tells us inpassages that the opponents regarded the angels as daughters of God and. them female names. The Qur' iinic messenger's accusation that the OPiPOilentswere no better than idolaters is based at least in part on the idea that their vener- ·ation of angels was incompatible with pure monotheism (ikhla~), even ifQur'anic cosmology also grants a prominent place and extensive sphere of ·activity to angels. 14Furthermore, any discussion of angels in the Qur' iin needs to take into accountalso other spiritual entities, prominent among them the spirit (nil;z) and the holyspirit (nil;z al-qudus). These are mentioned in the Qur'iin in ways that suggest aconnection with angels, a connection that is evident too in some Jewish andChristian texts from before Islam. As O'Shaughnessy in particular has shown, thepneumatology of the Qur' iin is not consistent and is often obscure .IS Sometimesthe spirit is mentioned in tandem with the angels in a way that suggests that it isdifferent from them but related to them, perhaps a superior type of angel. In otherplaces the spirit seems almost to be assimilated to the idea of an angel. The mostobvious example of that is when one compares Q 2:97 and 16:102, which, in ···broadly parallel words, seem ·to be concerned with the source of the revelation:the former refers to Gabriel as the one who "brings it down", the latter to theholy spirit.In allusions to Jesus and to Mary's conception of him, the idea of the spiritagain appears in a variety of ways that suggest a connection with or even assimilationto that of an angel. In what must be a reference to the story of Gabriel beingsent to Mary by God to announce her pregnancy, Gabriel is unnamed but describedas God's spirit in the form of a man (Q 19:16-33). Elsewhere in the Qur'iin theconception of Jesus is described as resulting from the infusion of God's spirit intoMary in a way similar to that in which it had been breathed into Adam, and Jesus,the second Adam, is himselfreferred to as a spirit from God (Q 21:91; 66:12;4:171). At Qur'iin 3:45 Jesus is identified as one of those "drawn close"(al-muqarrabiin; sci!. to the throne of God) while Q 4:172 tells us that both Jesus14 For general surveys of Qur'anic angelology, see E/2 s.v. "Mala'ika" (D.B. MacDonald and W.Madelung), and EQ s.v. "Angel" (G. Webb). For the ideas of the mushrikiin about the angels'powers of intercession and their identification of them as female offspring of God, see Hawting,Idolatry, index, s.v. "angels, angel worship". Cf. too the article ofCrmie referred to above.15 T. O'Shaughnessy, The Development of the Meaning of Spirit in the Koran, Rome: Pontificiumlnstitutum Orientalium Studiorum, 1953.Messengers and angels in the Qur 'an 379(al-masfl;z) and the angels drawn close (al-mala 'ika al-muqarrabana) are servants'ofGod. 16Another Qur'iinic concept that needs to be mentioned in this connection is thatthe amr, which is often referred to in tandem with the spirit. Again, asO'::lhaLughn,essy has demonstrated, the idea of the amr is often vague, but it seemsoccasion to represent a personified spiritual power through which God worksthe world. O'Shaughnessy himself suggests that we could under~tand the amr,some passages at least, as an Arabic form of the Aramaic memra ', an expresfrequentlyused in the Targums and Rabbinic texts as a substitute for terms.· referring to God, or for a messenger of God. 17The context ofthe Qur'anic argument: angels as God'ssubstitutes and hypostases ,In the Qur'anic view, therefore, other spiritual entities are associated with angels,and sometimes referred to in ways that suggest they were envisaged as a sort ofsuperior angel. As O'Shaughnessy has suggested in his investigation of the· · concept of spirit in the Qur' iin, while one cannot usually show a direct contact orinfluence, it is nevertheless possible to point to a number of pre-Islamic Jewishand Christian texts and ideas that provide similarities and parallels. ·We are faced here with notions that were developed significantly among Jewsand Christians in the late pre-Christian and early Christian periods as a partialanswer to the problem of how God operates in the world. These notions have beenreferred to as divine agency speculation, and they have been investigated especiallywith regard to how Christians came to venerate Jesus as divine. 18 God wasoften understood to have worked through non-physical entities envisaged assubordinate to Him but at the same time regarded as representations of, or substitutesfor, God. They were called by a variety of designations (word, wisdom,spirit, power, etc.), envisaged as spiritual or non-material entities, and frequentlytalked of in terms appropriate to angels. Some scholars have adopted the term"angelomorphic" as a way of talking of this phenomenon. 19 In early Christianformulations of the Trinity both the second person (Christ, the Logos) and the16 The idea of "those drawn close" (to the throne or presence of God or a secular ruler) occurs in anumber of Qur' iinic passages, the majority of which do not relate to the angels. For a discussion ofthem, and of the link made by some of the Muslim commentators between the muqarrabiin and theBiblical cherubim, see J. Wansbrough, Quranic Studies, London: Oxford University Press, 1977,30-31.17 O'Shaughnessy, Spirit in the Koran, 33-42.18 L.W. Hurtado, One God, One Lord: Early Christian Devotion and Ancient Jewish Monotheism,London: T&T Clark, 1998.19 The term {theologie angelomorphique) appears to have been first used by J. Danielou, Theo/ogie duJudeo-Christianisme ,Tournai: Desclee, 1958, e.g. 179, and is now common currency in scholarlywriting on Christo logy. B.B. Bucur uses the expression angelomorphic pneumatology in a number ofarticles and in the title ofhis Angelomorphic Pneumatology: Clement of Alexandria and Other EarlyChristian Witnesses, Leiden: Brill, 2009.il!