Did Muhammad Exist?: An Inquiry into Islam's Obscure Origins (31 page)

The early records offer nothing to indicate that Ali and Muawiya settled their differences by recourse to the Book of Allah. In fact, as we have seen, the records left behind by the Arab conquerors—the coins they issued, their official inscriptions on public buildings—include no mention of the Qur'an. Thus it is extremely unlikely that Muawiya's partisans raised up copies of the Qur'an on their lances, or that they had copies of the Qur'an at all. In a culture in which every copy of a book had to be painstakingly written out by hand, it is difficult to imagine that these warriors would have had that many copies of the Qur'an on hand so soon after Uthman standardized the text. It is equally difficult to believe that everyone involved—the partisans of Ali and of Muawiya and others as well—would be so familiar with the Qur'an's contents at this early date, in a culture where literacy could not be taken for granted. And even if they somehow managed to secure all these copies of the Qur'an, would they really have risked losing or damaging the “Book of God” in the heat of battle?

Tabari's account of the Battle of Siffin makes for a good story. But it does not hold up as reliable history.

The canonical version of the early Islamic conquests holds that the conquerors stormed out of Arabia with the Qur'an in their hands and Muhammad as their inspiration. At the same time, Islamic tradition situates the collection of the Qur'an during the reign of the caliph Uthman—some two decades after the Arab conquests began.
That means that even according to the canonical account, most, if not all, of the early conquerors could have had only part of the Qur'an with them, if they had any of it at all. It is undeniable that throughout the Middle Ages, at the apex of the great Islamic Empires, Arab and Muslim armies had the words of the Qur'an on their lips as they conquered huge expanses of territory. But in what are generally understood as the earliest days of Islam, when they conquered Syria in 637, Armenia and Egypt in 639, North Africa beginning in the early 650s, and probably Cyprus in 654, there was no Qur'an for them to brandish. Nor is it even certain that they had one for many years after that. Recall that the Qur'an makes no appearance in the surviving documents and artifacts of the Muslims until around six decades after the Arab conquests began.

And when the Qur'an finally emerged, it may have been considerably different from the Qur'an that Muslims revere today.

Textual Variants and Uncertainty in the Qur'an

The standard Qur'anic text that circulates today is supposed to be based on the version Uthman distributed, but there is no direct evidence of that. Only fragments of Qur'an manuscripts date back to the seventh century. And these fragments mostly do not contain diacritical marks, so it is impossible to confirm that they were written as the Qur'an in the first place, rather than as some other document that was adapted as part of the Qur'an.
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There is also no telling what textual alterations might have been made before the time of the earliest surviving manuscripts.
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Historian John Gilchrist notes that the “Samarqand and Topkapi codices are obviously two of the oldest sizeable manuscripts of the Qur'an surviving, but their origin cannot be taken back earlier than the second century of Islam. It must be concluded that no such manuscripts of an earlier date have survived. The oldest manuscripts of the Qur'an still in existence date from not earlier than about one hundred years after Muhammad's death.”
¹⁵
No
complete extant copy of the Qur'an dates from the first century of the Arabian conquests.
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Beyond the fact that the text Uthman supposedly collected does not survive, there is also no mention of the Qur'an as such in the available literature until early in the eighth century. What's more, although Uthman supposedly burned other versions of the Qur'an, some variant readings in the Qur'anic text have survived to the present day. To be sure, none of the extant variants is large, but even the smallest is enough to debunk the Islamic apologetic argument that Fethullah Gülen articulated, that the Qur'anic text is reliable because it remains “unaltered, unedited, not tampered with in any way, since the time of its revelation.”

The variants begin with the Qur'an's very first sura, the
Fatiha
, or “Opening.” This sura is the most common prayer in Islam; a pious Muslim who prays five times a day will repeat it seventeen times daily. As a prayer and a liturgical text, it may have been added to the Qur'an later. According to hadiths, Abdullah ibn Masud, one of Muhammad's companions, did not have this sura in his version of the Qur'an, and other early Islamic authorities expressed reservations about its inclusion also.
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The sura does not fit in with the rest of the Qur'an, in that it is in the voice of the believer offering prayer and praise to Allah, not Allah addressing Muhammad. Islamic orthodoxy has it that Allah is the speaker in every part of the Qur'an; so with the
Fatiha
, the believer must accept that the deity is explaining how he should be prayed to, without explaining directly that that is what he is doing.

Not only was there early uncertainty about whether the
Fatiha
should be in the Qur'an, but there are also variations in its text. One version of the prayer that circulates among the Shiites says to Allah, “Thou dost direct to the path of the Upright One,” rather than the canonical “Show us the Straight Path” (1:6). The historian Arthur Jeffery found in Cairo a manual of Islamic law of the Shafii school that contained the same variant, along with other departures from the canonical text.
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Hafs, Warsh, and Other Variants

The edition of the Qur'an published in Cairo in 1924 has won wide acceptance as an accurate reflection of the Uthmanic text. But little known even among Muslims is the existence of an entirely separate and officially sanctioned manuscript tradition. The Warsh tradition of the Qur'anic text predominates in western and northwest Africa; the Cairo Qur'an represents the more common Hafs tradition.

Most of the differences between the Hafs and Warsh traditions are ones of orthography, some of which can be significant. There are also several instances of small but unmistakable divergences in meaning. In Qur'an 2:125, for example, the Hafs text has Allah commanding the Muslims: “Take the station of Abraham as a place of prayer.” The Warsh tradition, however, has no imperative, saying merely: “They have taken the station of Abraham as a place of prayer.”
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In Qur'an 3:13, Allah recalls of the Battle of Badr that there was “one army fighting in the way of Allah, and another disbelieving, whom they saw as twice their number, clearly, with their very eyes.” At least so goes the Hafs text. In the Warsh, the pronoun is different, so that the text reads “whom you saw” rather than “whom they saw.”
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In the Hafs Qur'an, sura 3:146 asks, “And with how many a prophet have there been a number of devoted men who fought?” The Warsh question is significantly different: “And with how many a prophet have there been a number of devoted men who were killed?”
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In recent decades, numerous other Qur'ans have been published that differ markedly in orthography from the Cairo text.
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In 1998 the King Fahd Complex for the Printing of the Holy Qur'an released an edition. In this Saudi edition, the
Fatiha
calls Allah “Master of the Day of Judgment” (1:4). The word
malik
means “master” with a long
alif
(a). With a short
alif
, however, the word means “king.” “King of the Day of Judgment” is exactly how some other texts of the Qur'an render this verse, including a text published in Istanbul in 1993.
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At least one variant in modern Qur'ans involves a flat contradiction. The Hafs tradition presents Qur'an 3:158 this way: “And if you
die, or are slain, lo, it is certainly to Allah that you are gathered.” On the other hand, a Qur'an published in Tehran in 1978 asserts: “And if you die, or are slain, lo, it is not to Allah that you are gathered.”
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None of these divergences in meaning (even the contradiction) is so significant as to affect Islamic doctrine or practice. But the very existence of discrepancies, like the many hints of a Christian Syriac substratum, suggests that the Qur'an is the product of many hands and that its text was at one point considerably more fluid than Islamic orthodoxy acknowledges. In an examination of Islam's origins, this fluidity becomes a matter of no small significance. Like so much else about the accepted story of how Islam began, the standard Islamic account of how the Qur'an came about falters in the face of the facts.

Once it becomes clear that the Qur'an was not a single unified text in every time and place in which it was distributed, the responsible historian has no choice but to look for alternative explanations for the Qur'an's origins.

The First Mention of the Qur'an

If the canonical stories about Zayd ibn Thabit and Uthman were true, one would expect to see references to the Qur'an in other records. But no such references are to be found in the historical records of the mid-seventh century. As we have seen, the coinage of the early caliphate and the edifices that survive from that period bear no Qur'anic inscriptions, quotes, or references of any kind. And although the Arab invaders poured through the Middle East and North Africa, the peoples they conquered seemed to have no idea that the conquerors, whom they called “Hagarians,” “Saracens,” “Muhajirun” or “Ishmaelites,” had a holy book at all. Christian and Jewish writers of the period never made even the smallest reference to such a book.

Not until the early part of the eighth century did mentions of the Qur'an begin to appear in the polemical literature of non-Muslims and Muslims alike. The first reference to the Qur'an by a non-Muslim
occurred around the year 710—eighty years after the book was supposedly completed and sixty years after it was supposedly collected and distributed. During a debate with an Arab noble, a Christian monk in the Middle East cited the Qur'an by name. The monk wrote, “I think that for you, too, not all your laws and commandments are in the Qur'an which Muhammad taught you; rather there are some which he taught you from the Qur'an, and some are in
surat albaqrah
and in
gygy
and in twrh.”
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By this point Arab armies had conquered a huge expanse of territory, stretching from North Africa, across the Levant, Syria, and Iraq, and into Persia, and yet those eight decades of conquest had produced scarcely a mention of the book that supposedly inspired them. And when the Qur'an finally was mentioned, it appears that the book was not even in the form we now know.
Surat albaqrah
(or
al-Baqara)
is “the chapter of the Cow,” which is the second, and longest, sura of the Qur'an. The eighth-century monk thus quite clearly knew of a Qur'an that didn't contain this sura; he considered
surat albaqrah
to be a stand-alone book, along with
gygy
(the Injil, or Gospel) and
twrh
(the Torah). It is unlikely that the monk simply made an error: Who ever mistakes a chapter of a book for a separate book? If the Qur'an's largest sura was not present in the Muslim holy book by the early eighth century, it could not have been added by Muhammad, Zayd ibn Thabit, or Uthman.

There is other evidence that the “chapter of the Cow” existed as a separate book and was added to the Qur'an only at a later date. As noted, John of Damascus, writing around 730, referred to the “text of the Cow” (as well as the “text of the Woman” and the “text of the Camel of God”), giving the impression that it existed as a standalone text. Even Islamic tradition points to the “chapter of the Cow” as a separate book. The Islamic chronicler Qatada ibn Diama (d. 735) made one of the earliest references to any part of the Qur'an by a Muslim. He recorded that during the Battle of Hunayn in 630, during the lifetime of Muhammad, Muhammad's uncle al-Abbas rallied the troops by crying out, “O companions of the chapter of the Cow
[ya ashab surat al-Baqara
]!”
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Qatada ibn Diama did not have al-Abbas saying, “O companion of the Qur'an,” but instead fixed on one sura of the Muslim holy book, albeit its longest and arguably most important one. This suggests that even by Qatada's time, the Qur'an was not yet fixed in its present form.

Abd al-Malik and Hajjaj ibn Yusuf: Collectors of the Qur'an?

In light of all this evidence, the Islamic traditions pointing to the caliph Abd al-Malik and his associate Hajjaj ibn Yusuf as collectors of the Qur'an take on new significance. Abd al-Malik, who reigned from 685 to 705, claimed to have been responsible for the collection of the Qur'an when he said: “I fear death in the month of Ramadan—in it I was born, in it I was weaned, in it I have collected the Qur'an
(jama'tul-Qur'ana)
, and in it I was elected caliph.”
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Remember, too, the hadiths that record Hajjaj ibn Yusuf as collecting and editing the Qur'an during Abd al-Malik's caliphate.

From the historical records available to us, it makes sense that the Qur'an was not collected until Abd al-Malik's reign. If Uthman had indeed collected the standard book and sent copies to all the Muslim provinces in the 650s, it is inexplicable that the Muslims would have made no reference to it for decades thereafter. The first Qur'anic references, as we have seen, did not appear until the time of Abd al-Malik and his Dome of the Rock inscriptions. And even then, it is not certain whether the inscriptions were quoting the Qur'an or the Qur'an was quoting the inscriptions.