Have you read the dialog between the emir Amrou and the patriarch John. There are 2 things that suprise me in this dialog :
- some people say that the emir never mention the Quran , nor Muhammad, but only the Torah and they are right , and they come to the conclusion that this emir wasn't a muslim,
Yes of course. Michael P. Penn has made a paper about this topic, (2008) : JOHN AND THE EMIR
A NEW INTRODUCTION, EDITION AND TRANSLATION* I have it, but it is not available on the internet.
His conclusion : "An analysis of John and the Emir and a comparison of its form and
content with other early Christian texts on Islam yields several important conclusions regarding
the work’s genre, date, and historicity: it is al- most certain that John and the Emir is not
an entirely accurate representation of an encounter between a Christian and a Muslim ruler,
rather it is a carefully crafted piece of apologetics; it is quite probable that the text was
not originally composed in the 640s but rather was written in the late seventh or in the eighth
century; and it is quite possible that a meeting between John Sedra and {Umayr ibn Sa'd never
actually took place but is rather a later literary construct. In sum, it is extremely unlikely
that a Miaphysite patriarch and a Muslim commander ever exchanged the very words preserved in
John and the Emir. To read John and the Emir as if it were a transcript filled with unbiased
empirical data misconstrues both the text itself and the circumstances under which it was written.
As with most other disputation texts, John and the Emir does not reflect an attempt at objective
historiography as much as an act of apologetics, polemics, and meaning-making. This conclusion does
not lessen the importance of John and the Emir for the study of early Christian/Muslim interactions, but it does highlight the need for particular reading strategies to effectively analyse this document, strategies that
focus more on questions of ideology and representation than on historical reconstruction."
2/ For me there is no "Muslim" as we know it before 700 in Syria.
- at the same time, the text speaks about the Mahgraye law and I have never seen anyone trying to explain what it meant in a context where there is no mention of the Quran
You're right. But the "Quran" is said to have been "official" in the 650's. But it is clear that nobody venture to explain what is this "Mahgraye law", even Penn does not talk about it.
Topic: Qur'anic studies today