Fred Donner - A Historian’s View of the Qurʾān
https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/jiqsa-2024-0020/htmlIt is, of course, a well-entrenched view that the Qurʾān first appeared entirely within the lifetime of the prophet Muḥammad, and within the milieu in which he worked. But if we accept this idea – that the Qurʾān text comes from that restricted chronological and geographical context, the early 7th century Ḥijāz – then the existence of such contradictions becomes difficult to explain. It seems more plausible to assume that the text arose in some ways differently. Two possibilities seem most likely.
The first is to see the text as a fusion of materials from the time of Muḥammad, but originally coming from different communities, perhaps originally situated in different localities, which differed radically from one another in their attitude toward Christians and toward the ahl al-kitāb more generally. In this way, positive and negative views on them might both have been incorporated into the text we now have. (Incidentally, this hypothesis might also help explain the existence of the markedly different rhetorical and literary styles found in the Qurʾān – perhaps these different local materials not only espoused different attitudes, but also expressed them in different ways. But that is another issue.)
The other logical possibility is to assume that the text was reworked or edited over time, with an earlier text or base layer (perhaps even one dating in part from before the time of the prophet?), to which additional material was added later, reflecting the different attitudes of later times. Both Günter Lüling and Patricia Crone suggested that parts of the Qurʾān might date to before the time of Muḥammad,[12] and some scholars have in the past two decades suggested that the Qurʾān contains interpolations dating from decades after the prophet, notably Edouard-Marie Gallez and David Reid Ross.[13] These works have not gained widespread attention or support, but perhaps such approaches need to be more broadly considered. If nothing else, the evidently changing attitude of the Umayyads toward Christians as the seventh century progressed raises the question of whether this may underlie some of the Qurʾān’s contradictory utterances.
Another aspect of the Qurʾān that strikes me as curious is what we might call the text’s muted attention to the prophet himself – that is to say, the Qurʾān hardly talks about Muḥammad. If, as I believe, the most basic definition of a Muslim is “someone who believes in the Qurʾān as God’s word, and Muḥammad as God’s prophet,” we might expect that after the instruction found in God’s word – to be always mindful of God, fear the Last Day, treat the less fortunate kindly – the Qurʾān would contain a great deal of specific information about the prophet. But as all of you surely know, this is not the case, for the Qurʾān only mentions the prophet directly a few times. Is this perhaps a hint that the bulk of the text is early, that it comes from a time before the community had clearly defined itself in such a way that the prophet and his mission were a central part of that identity? As some of you know, I have argued elsewhere that this clear focus on Qurʾān and prophet as the basis of the new community’s identity may have been first championed by the Umayyads.[14] So, contrary to my reflections on the contradictions on Christians in the Qurʾān, perhaps this qurʾānic reticence on the prophet suggests that most of the text is early after all.
Regardless of how the Qurʾān’s relative silence about Muḥammad is to be explained, however, one thing that we know for sure is that the later Muslim community of the eighth and subsequent centuries, armed with this Qurʾān-cum-prophet identity package, strove mightily to recover, and sometimes to invent, as much information about the prophet’s life as possible. The Qurʾān itself was not of much help to them in this project of filling out the contours of the prophet’s life, but later scholars proved very skillful at detecting veiled or implicit references to him in the text – what we might call “finding the prophet in the Qurʾān.” But this, then, raises for us further questions about the text and how we should properly understand it.
Topic: Qur'anic studies today