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

470 Adam SilversteinWhat, then, is the answer? And what might it tell us about Fir'awn's sarh? Letus examine the evidence. In favour of the identification of the .yarf:z with the Towerof Babel three points can be made. The first concerns the reference to baked bricksin both contexts. Baked bricks are as typical of Mesopotamia as they are atypicalof Egypt and the use of the root l.b.n. in both the Biblical Hebrew and the Qur'iinicArabic hints at a connection between the two buildings. The second point is theform and significance of the buildings in both contexts: the .yar/:l, like the Tower ofBabel, was an edifice stretching between the earth and the heavens, whose declaredintention was to challenge God or Allah. In the Bible, God had promised the postdiluvianpeoples that he would scatter them across the face of the earth (Genesis11:7-9); hence, the attempt to unite. "else we be scattered all over the world" is aclear rejection of God's will. In the Qur'iin, Fir'awn openly doubts the existence ofMoses' God and wants to reach Him to prove that Moses is lying about Him.The third point in support of the comparison is the fact that Muslim commentatorsfrequently seem to imply that Fir' awn's .yar/:z was -or was related to-the Tower ofBabel. The evidence for this is scattered widely throughout the sources, but the twomain points that emerge from the early historians. and exegetes are as follows:The Tower of Babel was built by Nimrod. This is in conformity with Jewishand Christian interpretations of the episode, where Nimrod's name -which isderived from the Semitic root meaning-"to-rebel" - is adduced as proof thathe was the ruler at the time of this rebellion against God. 132 Nimrod and Pharaoh were routinely compared and even interchangeable inIslamic sources. According to Ibn I:Iawqal, "Babel was the city of the Nimrodsand the Fir'awns"; 14 I:Iimyari states that "[Nimrod] built the .yarf:z after theconfusion of tongues. It is this building that was called the mijdal (Tower) ...They said: when he conceived the idea to raise the .yarf:z up to heaven andclimbed on top of it to watch, as he claimed, the God oflbriihim, God brought·his building off its foundations ... (Q 16:26-27)"_15 According to Yiiqiit,Nimrod was "the Fir'awn of Ibrahim's day" and built the sarh 16 - a statementthat also appears in Bakri and other sources. 17 These author~ refer to the mijda/ 18in siira 16, in which Nimrod is not mentioned explicitly, and seem to be awareof the intertextual relationship between Nimrod's mijdal and Fir' awn's .yarf:z to13 Cf. Babylonian Talmud, f:lullfn, 89a.14 Ibn f:lawqal, Masa/ik wa-mama/ik, ed. J.H. Kramers, Leiden: Brill, 1938, 244.15 Mul)ammad b. 'Abd al-Mun'im al-f:limyar'i, ai-Rawt;i al-mi'tar fi khabar al-aqtar, Beirut:Maktabat Lubniin, 1985, 357.16 Mu 'jam a/-bu/dan, Leipzig: Brockhaus, 1866-73, 1:146,447-50.17 E.g. Mas'iidi, Munij al-dhahab, ed. C. Pellat, Beirut: al-Jiimi'a al-Lubnaniyya, 1965, 1:51;2:260--61.18 Note that although mijdal is directly borrowed from the Hebrew migdal, which is the term used forthe 'tower [of Babel]', the connotations of the rootj.d/. are different in Hebrew and Arabic:migdal obviously refers to the large size of the tower (cf. Heb. gada/, large), but it surely impliedrebellion in Arabic, where the same root refers to "being contentious.''The Qur'anic Pharaoh 471such an extent that some authors place them together in Babel, 19 or explain thatNimrod was "a Fir'awn." In fact, in numerous sources Nimrod's biography isfilled with details from Pharaoh's and Fir' awn's lives, and vice versa. 20 In otherwords, both Nimrod and Fir' awn built a tower by which to reach Allah; theirintentions in dohlg so were rebellious and Allah foiled them accordingly; bothwere tyrannical rulers who claimed to be gods; Nimrod is thus sometimesdescribed as being a "Fir' awn" and his mijdal is sometimes called a .yarf:z. 21These writers may also have been aware of the baked-brick motif in both storiesbut I have found no evidence for this in the sources. The point is that the earlyMuslim exegetical tradition was often on the verge of stating outright thatFir' awn's .yarf:z was the Tower of Babel (or was comparable to it), but on everyoccasion stopped short of making such a statement.The question as to the identity o'fthe Tower of Babel's builders also occupied therabbis on the eve of Islam. It should be remembered that the Bible only states:"They said to one another 'Come let us make bricks and bum them hard'". Whosaid this to whom? In answering this question, a fifth-century Jewish source hintsat Pharaoh's and Nimrod's cooperation in this regard. The midrash GenesisRabbah (38) explains that "They said to one another" means that "Mi.yrayyim"said to "Kiish". As mentioned above, "mi.yrayyim" is one of the synonyms forPharaoh in the Bible, though it usually means "Egypt." Similarly, while "Kiish"ordinarily denotes a geographical location in Africa, it is also the name given inthe Bible for Nimrod's father. Thus, "Mi.yrayyim said to Kush" could have beeninterpreted by Muslim exegetes as being a reference to Pharaoh speaking toNimrod or his father. Whatever the case may be, it would seem that Muslimscholars were not alone in conflating Nimrod's and Fir' awn's .yarf:z-building activitiesand· on the basis of the foregoing arguriients .the case could be made thatFir' awn's .yar/:z refers to- or at the very least evokes- the Tower of Babel.Since there is no reason to dissociate Fir' awn's .yarf:z from the Tower of Babelexcept in response to accusations that they were to be equated, the evidenceagainst associating the two buildings is by nature reactionary: accordingly, thecounter-argument has mostly taken the form of refutations of the arguments' forequating the two buildings. Because the most commonly repeated argument infavour of the comparison is the fact that Fir' awn's .yar/:z involved baked bricks(which are associated with Mesopotamia but not ancient Egypt), modern Muslimwriters have expended an enormous amount of effort in attempting to prove thatbaked bricks were used in ancient Egypt too. The lengths to which they go inarguing this point and the urgency of their tone are truly remarkable. Their efforts,19 According to Mas'iidi, five kings of Babylon were also rulers of Egypt (Muriij 2:95).20 For a discussion of the parallels, see: Schwarzbaum, Mi-maqor yisrael we yishmael, 188ff; andC. Janssen, Babil: The City of Witchcraft and Wine, Ghent: University of Ghent, 1995, 145-87.21 In conformity with the theme of " 0 ar(l-building tyrants," Yiiqiit relates an account according towhich Nebuchadnezzar also built a 0ar(l! (Mu 'jam a/-bu/dan, 3:380).