The Holy Quran

Islam is fundamentally a simplification, an Arabized version of the already straightforward strains of Christianity dominant in the Eastern Roman Empire and parts of the Sasanian Empire in the 7th century. Islam’s holy book, the Quran, was written for a desert people whose word for politics, “siyasa,” originally described the management and training of horses and camels.

The core of Christianity was built around a vision of great complexity, in which the Greek demiurge elevated above reality is unaware of the horrors he created. As in the old literary motif of the king who dressed up like an ordinary man, mingling with the poor to know about their actual experience, it’s only when the demiurge enters his own creation and experiences it from within, as an inhabitant, that he can he see the implications of what he fathered: and he becomes a rebel, as well as a king^[1].

Trying to convey this complexity, Trinitarian Christians believed in a God that was one and was three (plus the Mother of God), Monophysite Christians in a God that was Jesus and had suffered for mankind’s sins, Nestorians in a God that had been announced by Christ, a holy man; Muslims resolved that Allah had been there alone, lofty and inscrutable, until Muhammad had grasped his actual meaning.

This fact was evident to early Christians. In the first period of Islamic advances on the Levant, Byzantium’s Emperor Heraclius assembled bishops and governors to get a better sense of what they were up against, and the general impression was that Arabs were barbarians who had had a glimpse of monotheism, but far from a full enlightenment like that the Christians themselves claimed to have reached^[2]. This was clear to a minority of early Muslim theologians and historians, like Ibn Ishaq (704-767), who wrote about the so-called Bahira tradition in which a Christian monk foretells and explains Muhammad’s revelation as “something succinct that… uncouth desert Arabs” can accept.

Judaism, especially after it got in contact with Zoroastrianism, became a direct negation of polytheism, and yet it begat a religion – Christianity – that relied on a complex triad of divine persons after it accepted Graeco-Roman legality and laws (“nomos” in Greek) as a complement to godly law. Islam rejects the Christian tweak completely, in all earnestness^[3], in the process driving monotheism back to primitive stage in which law is religious law – “din” in both Arabic and Hebrew and not “nomos,” still used in Christian Syriac, like Arabic and Hebrew a Semitic language, to refer to secular law as opposed to “din.”

In Christianity, the Son dies on the Cross. For Islamic theologians, following Muhammad, this is doubly not true: it’s not just that Jesus wasn’t the Son, as Jews also hold, but also that he didn’t actually die in the Cross. Sura 4:157 puts it best: “the Jews boasted ‘We killed Christ Jesus the son of Mary, the Messenger of Allah’ but they killed him not, nor crucified him, but so it was made to appear to them.”

There was no Son, because there is no Father. In contrast to both Judaism and Christianity, Islam excludes Allah from the domain of the paternal logic: Allah is not a parent, not even a symbolic one – Allah is one, he is neither born nor does he give birth. There is no place for a Holy Family in Islam. This is why Islam emphasizes so heavily the fact that Muhammad himself was an orphan^[4] and, from very on, it was a religion most attractive to deracinated followers, who found a new spiritual family within the Ummah.

Abraham, the tribal father of the Jews in the Bible, is cited dozens of times in the Quran, although he’s never held in anything close to the esteem showed for him in the Jewish holy book. His son Ishmael, progenitor to all Arabs according to Semitic mythology, is also oft cited, although his mother Hagar, Abraham’s concubine, is not. To a degree, like Muhammad, like all future Muslims, Ishmael is an orphan: in the Quran, Allah commands Abraham to leave him with his mother in the desert, where they almost die of thirst before they are taken in by an Arab tribe^[5].

Across the Roman Empire, the Christian Church had emerged as a complement of the state, taking many of the functions that intermediate, semi-assimilated pre-Roman and early Roman institutions had once fulfilled, while rendering “unto God the things that are God’s.”^[6] Islam replaced that with a refuge for spiritual orphans, an all-pervasive community of believers, a tribal coalition of the willing reimposing traditional views of virtue, led by a secular authority that was also the religious authority: a dual institution replacing two institutions that, especially, over the first two centuries after Muhammad, seemed to offer a new, more effective governance approach^[7].

This new approach, even more didactic than that taken by the New Testament, explains in part why much of the Hebrew scriptures is recycled and retold in the Quran with an earnestness and lack of proportion that would have made any Roman scholar blush. Another explanation would be that the Arab writers of the Quran hardly were prestigious biblical experts or world-renowned theologians, and they retold stories and sayings in the manner preferred by simple, mostly illiterate Arab folk.

A good example is the well-known story of Jonah and the Whale, long suspect for Hebrew scholars who thought it unlikely and not particularly enlightening that a stubborn man like Jonah spent three days inside of the belly of a giant fish, praying for deliverance before it was given by God. Lucian of Samosata, in “A True Story,” parodied the unlikely tale for laughs; four centuries later, retold in the Quran, the story of “Yunis” became a massive success among the easily impressed peoples of Arabia, many of whom really weren’t all that familiar with fish.

Likewise, the story of the patriarch Lot (“Lut” in Arabic) who escaped the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, already complex in the Jewish Bible, becomes a jumble in the Quran, as the people of the destroyed cities – singled out by God because of their homosexual acts – are damned for the “Act of the People of Lot” (“Liwat” or “Lutiya”), so they are forever remembered for their sinfulness and of their “desire unto men instead of women.”^[8]

Another example is the Sura of the Cave (“Surat al-Kahf”) that, pursuant to the Prophet’s recommendation, has been recited publicly, prior to the call to prayer, every Friday morning, throughout the Muslim world, for the past 1400 years. Other than Al-Fatiḥa, the opening sura of the Quran, this is the only sura recited so regularly, and yet it refers to a very minor Christian legend, that of the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus who allegedly traveled forward in time to avoid Roman persecutions.

This simple, even childish tale of no importance in the Christian tradition is turned in Islam into a metaphor with multiple readings and ethical lessons. The sura is said to demonstrate that the ethos of a society can change, sometimes for the better, and it’s better to accept the positive benefits of the change rather than subjecting it to exhaustive and unsatisfying historical scrutiny^[9]. The sura also includes really simple theological fables like the Parable of the Two Men, where a rich man who boasts of his skepticism is destroyed by Allah and a poor man is rewarded for his faith, as well as two allegories repeating the importance of unquestioning belief, one of which stars a two-horned Alexander the Great who fears Allah very much.

Most of the best-known biblical stories are included in the Quran: Adam, the first man, is expelled from Paradise for eating from the forbidden tree; Noah builds an ark; Moses leads the Israelites out of Egypt and receives a revelation on Mount Sinai; Jesus, referred to as the Messiah, with some theological incongruence, works miracles, has disciples and rises to heaven. To this popular cast of characters, the Quran adds Arab prophets mentioned nowhere else – Had, Salih, Shuayb, Lugman, and others.

Despite the early circulation of sayings, precepts and stories, many dating back to Muhammad himself, the Quran only existed as a project of a holy book for much of the 7th century. The Tubingen Parchments, a partial version of the Quran found in 2014 in a German archive, have been dated to the mid-7th century, no later than 675 – that is, towards the end of Muawiya’s eventful reign as Umayyad caliph. It’s only around the last decade of the century, no less than five decades after Muhammad’s death, that a few verses of an early version, not exactly like the later standard, were inscribed on Jerusalem’s Dome of the Rock.

Local Christians certainly were long unaware of the existence of any alternative scripture, and even an entirely new religion, not just distinct of but also opposed to their own. The Iraqi Christian Patriarch Hnanisho I wrote around 700, when the region had been under nominal Islamic control for well over a generation, about a “new folly.”

Only in 705 Jacob of Edessa confirmed the emergence of Muslim prayers that were oriented toward Muhammad’s Kaaba in Mecca, instead of towards Christ’s and King David’s holy city of Jerusalem as before. John of Damascus, writing in 735, was still referring to the “Cult of the Ishmaelites” as one of many Christian heresies described in his “Book of Heresies”; within a few years, a Spanish Mozarabe (Christian) under Islamic domination wrote the Storia de Mahometh^[10] – eventually made part of the 9th century Cronica Prophetica – in which the Muslim prophet is described as the Antichrist and a false prophet predicted by the New Testament.

Much later, the Muslim polymath Yakub bin Ishaq Al-Kindi (801-873), considered by some the father of Arab philosophy, confidently wrote that the Quran had, obviously, been put together from different histories by different authors, much like the Christian Bible and all the Jewish holy books^[11] – an opinion that seems to have been widespread among learned people of his era, and pretty soon became downright heretical^[12].

Tradition holds, on good grounds, that Caliph Uthman – the third after Muhammad – was the first to order a standardized compilation of the Quran. That this was a fraught process is evident in the fact that Uthman eventually became the first caliph to be assassinated, and a civil war followed his passing. What eventually emerged as the Muslim holy book under Muawiya or soon thereafter^[13] is, much like the Bible, the product of a consensus among various scholars and politicians who incorporated diverse materials^[14], often traditionally (and dubiously) attributed to Muhammad himself^[15].

Like ancient Rome’s Twelve Tables and the Hebrew Bible itself, the book was compiled so that a specific tradition – in this case, the Muslim Arab tradition – would be kept on writing and accessible to all for future reference, instead of floating around as hearsay that influential people and new wannabe prophets, people like Umayyad arch-foes Ali and his family, might twist and remake for their own purposes. Hearsay would later return in force to the Muslim tradition as the “hadith” or “sayings” of the Prophet picked up by various scholars and mystics, but these never received the status of divine revelation, and only circulated widely from the mid-8th century, when the Quran was already finalized.

Due to its generous approach to pre-existing material, the Quran weaves in texts written (mostly or entirely) in Syriac, the liturgical language used by most if not all Arab Christians over the previous two to three centuries; many proper names, indeed, are cited in Syriac^[16]. This use of Syriac, similar but not at all identical to the Classic Arab in most of the Quran, explains inconsistencies and sources of heated debate like those evident in Sura 108, long puzzling for Muslim scholars who spoke no Syriac; in Arabic, the Sura reads:

Surely we have given you abundance

So pray to your Lord and make sacrifice

Surely he who hates you will be disinherited/without posterity/cut off.

Note that, if one reads this as an Arabic Syriac hybrid, however, the text is much easier to understand:

Surely we have given you [the virtue] of patience

So pray to your Lord and persist [in your prayer]

Your enemy [Satan] is thus vanquished.

At the same time, the insertion of Syriac concepts and ideas also result in the creation of new meanings for old Arabic words, an issue that was so salient and evident for early Arabic-speaking commentators that at least eighteen treatises were written between roughly 750 and 850 on what became known as the “rare expressions of the Quran.”^[17]

The Quran often tells the same story twice, in different ways. Notoriously, it adds a character called “Samiri” to one of the two versions it provides of the story of Moses, making this character guilty of manufacturing the Golden Calf – while in the other Moses only blames the Jewish people and his brother Aaron for it^[18]. These problems are hardly unique for the Quran, though: the Hebrew Bible is also given to repetitions (it has two Creation stories in Genesis 1:27 and Genesis 2:7), contradictions, obvious redactions and amendments, variants and suspected borrowings from earlier tradition, including the Zoroastrian and Greek cultures^[19].

In this spirit, the Quran preserves puzzling references to poorly understood issues and peoples like the Sabians/Sabi’un, twice promised entry into Heaven along with the “believers,” in 2:62 and 5:69, even though it’s not at all clear who they were. Various solutions to the question have been proposed, including the idea that they were followers of pre-Islamic cults and (less plausibly) a sect sympathetic to early Muslims, perhaps Manichean in origin^[20].

The problem is compounded by the later evolution of Arabic script, lacking capital letters and, for centuries, punctuation. This type of writing, almost certainly evolved from a script based on Aramaic created by missionaries and used by early Christian communities in Arabia^[21], was not standardized until the late 9th century with the addition of a dot for short vowels that is not present in early manuscripts – all of which included only consonants, like many primitive scripts. The addition of dots and later slashes for vowels, and their exact positioning (often unclear in older manuscripts) allows for alternative readings of certain words and passages^[22].

The Quran was also harmonized to account for differences between the dialect of Najd (the central region of Arabia) in which pre-Islamic poetry was typically written, and that of Muhammad’s Hijaz, in the process creating a somewhat artificial Classical Arabic that has remained the ideal for the language ever since.

Some characteristics of Arabic, including a great number of subtle modifiers for nouns allowing it to express very subtle distinctions, and a relative paucity of verb modifiers and tenses compared with Greek and Latin^[23], further complicate interpretations of the messages that the Quran’s early compilers intended to transmit.

Interpretation is not made easier by the fact that some Quranic verses appear to abrogate others, which has led to some animated theological disputes. The much-quoted Sura 4:43 appears to establish an Islamic ban on alcoholic intoxication (“Do not approach prayer while intoxicated until you are aware of what you say, nor in a state of ˹full˺ impurity”), thus abrogating, as mainstream commentators agree, Sura 16:67 (“out of the fruits of date-palms and grapes you derive intoxicants as well as wholesome sustenance. Surely there is a sign for those who use reason.”)^[24]

This use of abrogation has posed important problems, beyond the poorly supported ban on alcohol. Like Christianity, but unlike most Eastern religions, the Quran sees its religion as incompatible with others, which is why Sura 9:5 urges believers to “slay the polytheists wherever you find them” unless they repent or pay tax. Then again, multiple commentators have pointed out that this verse (and a few others) would abrogate 124 verses that would water down such bellicosity, since they call for toleration and patience^[25].

Quranic rules on female behavior and status, which essentially codify ancient desert customs so as to provide a modicum of protection to women while maintaining their subordination to men, have also been the focus of debates on subrogation at various places and points of history, even though the rules themselves are rather straightforward.

Sura 81:7 and 81:8 express opposition to burying girls alive, an approach that had been deemed as undesirable mostly everywhere else centuries before. Sura 2:223 makes it clear that women have a fundamental function in society (“Your wives are a place for sowing your seed, so come to your place of cultivation however you wish and put forth [righteousness] for yourselves,” a verse of a simple directness highlighted by the Christian John of Damascus in 735), Sura 2:228 states that “men are a degree above… in status”, Sura 4:11 rules that men have the right to twice the inheritance that women get, Sura 2:282 states that women’s testimony counts as half a testimony, etc.^[26]

Elsewhere, the Quran is pretty unambiguous: for example, about the preponderance of the sacred sites of Arabia over those inherited from Judaism and Christianity. Despite Jerusalem’s later importance for Muslims, the ancient Jewish capital is never mentioned in the Quran – this compares with over 800 mentions in the Hebrew Bible and over 100 in the New Testament – and Muhammad’s “Night Journey” verse (17:1) only describes Allah taking his servant to the Temple Mount complex: Al Majid Al Aqsa.

The omnipotence of Allah is also left in no doubt, since it’s everywhere asserted in the Quran, so that there can be no doubt: human will is totally subordinate to Allah's will, to the extent that man cannot be said to have a will of his own^[27]. Those who disbelieve in Him do so because it is Allah who wills them to disbelieve, as part of his plans, and Sura 8:67 makes it clear that their lives are cheap^[28]. This leads to a Muslim doctrine of predestination, often identified as Muslim fatalism by external observers.

The benefits that believers must expect in Heaven are also spelled out more clearly than in any other religious text. Sura 55, devoted to detailing the greatness of Allah, describes the wonders of Heaven from 55:46, including lush trees, flowing springs, two types of every fruit (easily accessible too), furnishings lined with rich brocade, green cushions and splendid carpets; in addition, there are “maidens of modest gaze, who no human or Jinn^[29] has ever touched before” (55:56) – that is, virgins available for the taking^[30].

Under Caliph Abd al-Malik, the Quran rapidly gained a central position in Islamic life. It was during his reign that the Dome of the Rock, the first significant building commissioned by a Muslim ruler, and thus the oldest Islamic monument, was erected on Judaism’s most sacred site. This was a statement of belonging to the Abrahamic tradition – the Rock is the place where, according to the Bible, God had called upon Abraham to sacrifice Isaac – as well as a clear message that any Jewish hopes for a Muslim restoration of Jerusalem’s Temple were as good as dead.

Indeed, the twenty-four Quranic verses – in quasi-standard version – inscribed on the Dome of the Rock appear to have been selected to aggravate both Jews and Christians. They start by stating what might be described as the Nestorian view of Islam (“There is no god by God. He is one. He has no associate.”), they go on to praise Muhammad, Allah’s messenger; and add a clear warning for other monotheists:

“O People of the Scripture! Do not exaggerate in your religion nor utter aught concerning God save the truth. The Messiah, Jesus son of Mary, was only a Messenger of God, and His Word which He conveyed unto Mary, along with His Spirit. So believe in God and His messengers and say not 'Three.' Cease! It is better for you! God is only One God. He’s too exalted to have a son. His is all that is in the heavens and all that is in the earth. And God is sufficient as Defender.”^[31]

The fact that over half of the message written in the Dome of the Rock is devoted to excoriating Jews (by describing Jesus as a “Messiah” and “only a Messenger of God,” rather than a half-Roman whoreson, the Talmud’s preferred description) and Christians (later in the inscription reminded that Jesus was not raised from the dead, but one day he will be, courtesy of Allah) clearly indicates that Islam has been precipitated as a separate religion.

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