The Qur'ān in Christian Thought - Saint Benedict Catholic Church

scripture, and especially in the Meccan sūrahs, one finds echoes of and allusions to theJewish and Christian scriptures, both canonical and apocryphal, and to their religiouslanguage and lore. There is a high quotient of inter-textuality between these scriptures.Indeed it seems that one could even credibly speak of a biblical subtext for the Qur’ān, 14so implicated are the earlier scriptural traditions in its narrative. The eminent Frenchscholar of Islam and the 20 th century’s leading Catholic thinker in Catholic/Muslimrelations, Louis Massignon (1883-1962), once wrote that from his point of view theQur’ān may be considered “une édition arabe tronquée de la Bible. . . . Le Qor’ân,” hewent on to say, “serait à la Bible ce qu’Ismaël fut à Isaac.” 15 The Qur’ān adopted many ofthe biblical personalities, the patriarchs, Joseph, Moses and Aaron, and from the NewTestament, Zachary, John the Baptist, Jesus, and his mother Mary. More than that, theQur’ān and Islamic tradition even honors Christian saints and martyrs, as in the instanceof the hagiographic legend of the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus, whom the Qur’ān calls ‘theCompanions of the Cave’ (al-Kahf (XVIII):9-26), 16 and Alexander the Great, whose storywas a staple of the Late Antique literary tradition. 17More recently, in the Medinan sūrahs, and especially in Christological passages,some scholars have been uncovering intriguing evidence of the interplay betweenmainline Syriac Christian (i.e., Melkite, Jacobite, and Nestorian) thinking and nascent,14 See Gabriel Said Reynolds, The Qur’ān and its Biblical Subtext (Religious Studies in the Qur’ān;London & New York: Routledge, 2009).15 Louis Massignon, Les trois prières d’Abraham (Paris: Cerf, 1997), p. 89.16 See Sidney H. Griffith, “Christian Lore and the Arabic Qur’ān: the ‘Companions of the Cave’ in Sūratal-Kahf and in Syriac Christian Tradition,” in Gabriel Said Reynolds (ed.), The Qur’ān in its HistoricalContext (Routledge Studies in the Qur’ān; London & New York: Routledge, 2008), pp. 109-138.17 See Kevin van Bladel, “The Alexander Legend in the Qur’ān 18:83-102,” in Reynolds, The Qur’ān in itsHistorical Context, pp. 175-203.6