Heretic: Why Islam Needs a Reformation Now (10 page)

Perhaps the biggest problem with the Qur’an’s unique status is the fact that the most violent Medina Muslims can find in holy writ justifications for everything they do. Consider the words of Tawfik Hamid, who was once a member of the same radical organization as the Al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri, but is now one of a new generation of Islamic reformers: “The literal understanding of Qur’an 9:29,” he has said, “can easily be used to justify what it [Islamic State] is doing. ‘Fight those who do not believe in Allah or in the Last Day and who do not consider unlawful what Allah and His Messenger have made unlawful and who do not adopt the religion of truth from those who were given the Scripture [Jews and Christians]—[fight] until they give the
jizyah
[payment of a tribute tax to Islamic authorities] willingly while they are humiliated.’ ”
14

Hamid notes that the four main schools of Islamic jurisprudence agree that this verse means “that Muslims must fight non-Muslims and offer them the following choices: Convert to Islam, pay a humiliating tax called
jizyah
or be killed.” Indeed, he adds, “A basic search of almost ALL approved interpretations for the Quran supports the same violent conclusion. The 25 leading approved Quran Interpretations (commentaries)—that are usually used by Muslims to understand the Quran—unambiguously support the violent understanding of the verse.”
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Hamid’s conclusion: while there are certainly many in Islam who are “moderate Muslims,” the central truth is that until “leading Islamic scholars provide a peaceful theology that clearly contradicts the violent views of the IS,” there will be only a limited space for such moderation.
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As the violence committed in the name of Islam is so often justified by the Qur’an, Muslims must be challenged to engage in critical reflection about their most sacred text. This process necessarily begins by acknowledging both its human composition and its numerous internal inconsistencies.

The Qur’an as Text

Muslims have generally shown little interest in subjecting the Qur’an to the same scientific, archaeological, and textual scrutiny the Bible has received.
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Yet respect for religious beliefs does not require us to suspend our own critical judgment where the Qur’an is concerned, any more than it does in the case of the Old or New Testaments.

Very little is definitely known about the Qur’an’s early composition and little work on it was done until quite recently. Western scholars who have studied the Qur’an dispassionately have argued against the traditional Islamic narrative.
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One of the scholars who took a more critical approach toward early Islamic history was John Wansbrough, who challenged the traditional narrative in two books published in the 1970s, arguing that Islam was originally a Judeo-Christian sect.
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Fred Donner, a professor of Near Eastern studies at the University of Chicago, has argued that the Qur’an was originally an orally recited text, and its history in the years following Muhammad’s death is “not clear.” The survival of various ancient manuscripts indicates that the recitation of the early Qur’anic text “was far from uniform.” An early collection of the verses may have been prepared under Caliph Abu Bakr and kept by Caliph Umar, but “it is not clear . . . whether this written collection was complete or not, nor whether it had any official status.”
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An official text is said to have been prepared under Caliph Uthman (644–656), who ordered that competing versions of the Qur’an be destroyed.
21
But in the city of Kufa one of Muhammad’s companions, Abdallah Masud, refused Uthman’s order. Islamic tradition itself also contains evidence that the Qur’an we know today differs from the original text. The pious Caliph Umar warned Muslims against saying they know the whole Qur’an, because “much of it has disappeared.”
22

Western researchers have advanced several theories about the Qur’an’s composition. Günter Lüling believes that it reflects a combination of Christian texts that have been given a new Islamic meaning, and “original Islamic passages which had been added to the Christian ones.” For Lüling, the Qur’an is a composite work shaped by human hands and human editors. Gerd Puin’s study of ancient manuscripts found in Yemen led him to conclude that the Qur’an is a “cocktail of texts,” some of which may have predated Muhammad by a century.
23
Christoph Luxenberg (a pseudonymous scholar) theorizes on the basis of linguistic analysis that there exists a gap of one and a half centuries between the Qur’an’s first publication and the final editing process through which it received its traditional form.
24
Fred Donner suggests another possibility: it may be a composite of different religious texts from various communities in Arabia. Certainly, there are significant variations in spelling in different versions of the Qur’an.
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What might have motivated people to compile a document like the Qur’an? Malise Ruthven offers the “revisionist theory”:

that the religious institutions [of Islam] emerged at least two centuries after Muhammad’s time, to consolidate ideologically, as it were, the Arab conquest. [This theory] would mean that the Arabs, anxious to avoid becoming absorbed by the more advanced religions and cultures of the peoples they conquered,
cast about for a religion that would help them to maintain their identity
. In so doing they looked back to the figure of the Arabian Prophet, and attributed to him the reaffirmation of an ancient Mosaic code of law for the Arabs.
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Ruthven notes that the revisionist theory, if true, would help explain why the
qiblas
of certain early mosques in Iraq face Jerusalem rather than Mecca.
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Other evidence indirectly supports this theory of later authorship. Tarek Fatah, founder of the Muslim Canadian Congress, has argued that a story about Muhammad—in which a Jewish tribe surrendered to the Islamic army in the city of Medina and the Prophet personally beheaded between six hundred and eight hundred prisoners of war—may in fact be a creation of later Muslim rulers, two hundred years after the incident was said to have occurred (627 CE). (This story is not in the Qur’an, but it shows how easily the life of the Prophet could be embroidered long after the fact.)

It is, to say the least, difficult in the face of all this evidence to deny that there was a human influence involved in composing what is now known as the Qur’an. Yet Islamic thinkers such as the late Pakistani Abul A’la Mawdudi have declared without hesitation that the Qur’an “exists exactly as it had been revealed to the Prophet; not a word—nay, not a dot of it—has been changed.”
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And that remains mainstream Muslim doctrine.

All scriptures contain contradictions and the Qur’an is no exception. But Islam is the only religion that has promulgated a doctrine to reconcile the Qur’an’s contradictions in order to maintain the belief that it is the direct revelation of God. As Raymond Ibrahim observes:

No careful reader will remain unaware of the many contradictory verses in the Quran, most specifically the way in which peaceful and tolerant verses lie almost side by side with violent and intolerant ones. The ulema were initially baffled as to which verses to codify into the Shari’a worldview—the one that states there is no coercion in religion (2:256), or the ones that command believers to fight all non-Muslims till they either convert, or at least submit, to Islam (8:39, 9:5, 9:29).
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To explain these contradictions, Islamic scholars developed a doctrine known as “abrogation” (
an-Nasikh wa’l Mansukh
), whereby Allah issues new revelations that supersede old ones.

Take, for example, the specific injunctions regarding war and peace. These successive revelations follow a distinctive arc in the course of the book: they begin in the early “Mecca” sections with admonitions of passivity in the face of aggression; then they give permission to fight back against aggressors; then they exhort Muslims to fight aggressors; finally, Muslims are commanded to fight all non-Muslims, whether they are the aggressors or not. What explains this pattern of gradually increasing aggressiveness? Most likely, it is the growing power and strength of the early Islamic community. Yet orthodox Muslim scholars insist that these changes have nothing to do with contingent circumstances.

Thus Ibn Salama (d. 1020) argued that chapter 9, verse 5, known as 
ayat as-sayf
, or the sword verses, abrogated some 124 of the more peaceful Meccan verses.
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The same applies to the verses concerning forcible conversion. As Ibrahim explains, “whereas Allah supposedly told the prophet that ‘there is no compulsion in religion’ (2:256), 
once the messenger grew strong enough
, Allah issued new revelations calling for all-out war/jihad till Islam became supreme (8:39, 9:5, 9:29, etc.).”
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Mainstream Islamic jurisprudence continues to hold that the sword verses (9:5 and also 9:29) have “abrogated, canceled, and replaced” those verses that call for “tolerance, compassion, and peace.”
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This same doctrine is also applied to apparent flaws or contradictions in Muhammad’s personal behavior. Suggesting, for example, that Muhammad chose to break a treaty with the Quraysh, rather than being provoked by their dishonorable behavior, has led to threats and violence against Western scholars and journalists. The goal in each instance is to place the Qur’an beyond criticism and reproach. After all, how can one argue with God’s word?

Of course, the Qur’an is not the only Islamic text. Accompanying it is the Hadith, the record of Muhammad’s sayings, the customs he followed, his teachings, and the personal examples that he left for all Muslims to follow, as well as assorted commentaries on his life. These texts were supposedly written or dictated by those who knew him, including his original companions and his wives. We have every reason to want to know more about the provenance and human composition of these texts, too. But the main questions that have been raised relate to the Qur’an. These include:

•
What did the Qur’an retain (or copy) from previous Jewish and Christian holy texts?

•
What was Muhammad’s contribution to the text now known as the Qur’an?

•
Which other individuals (or groups) composed the Qur’an?

•
What was added to the Qur’anic draft after the death of Muhammad?

•
What was edited out or rephrased from the original Qur’an?

The answers to some of these questions may never be fully known, but we have a duty to ask them—and to protect the lives and liberty of those grappling with them, Muslims and non-Muslims alike.

Leading the effort to bring modern methods to the study of the Qur’an is Professor Angelika Neuwirth of the Free University in Berlin. The research program she leads, Corpus Coranicum, is housed at the Brandenburg Academy of Science and Humanities and will likely take decades to complete.
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But analyzing the Qur’an is not like studying the holy texts of Judaism or Christianity. When two German researchers traveled to Yemen to take pictures of old Qur’anic manuscripts, the authorities confiscated the pictures. Although diplomats eventually secured the release of most of the pictures, the episode sparked predictable reactions. One letter to the
Yemen Times
read: “Please ensure that these scholars are not given further access to the documents. Allah, help us against our enemies.”
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The language of the Qur’an is Arabic, and to many Muslims that remains the divine language. To this day there are tremendous disputes about whether it is acceptable to translate it into other languages. That is partly because, unlike the Bible, the Qur’an is supposed to be learned by heart. As the Islamic scholar Michael Cook puts it, “The Muslim worshiper does not
read
the Qur’an, but rather
recites
it.” All 77,000 words, roughly 6,200 verses, of the Qur’an must be internalized, giving it what Cook calls “a degree of scriptural saturation of daily life which is hard for most inhabitants of the Western world to imagine.”
35
In early-nineteenth-century Cairo, for example, parties and gatherings held by the city’s middle and upper classes often featured a recital of the Qur’an, usually by three or four trained reciters, spanning as many as nine hours. Guests might come and go, but the recitation of the verses was continuous.

This highlights another important difference with other monotheistic scriptures. Although the Qur’an makes reference to some stories found in both the Torah and the Bible, it is distinctly not a storytelling text; no sustained meta-narrative binds it together. The Qur’an is not designed to be read as literature. Nor can scenes from it be depicted as scenes from the Bible were in works of art like Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel or Leonardo’s
Last Supper
. It does not have multiple narrators, like the Bible, but rather relies on one voice throughout, which the reciter is essentially channeling.

It is hard to convey to a non-Muslim how the recitation of the Qur’an embeds the text socially. In the middle of the twentieth century, for example, ordinary Egyptians riding public trams would move their lips, silently mouthing scripture as they traveled from stop to stop.
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I can well remember how when someone in my family lay sick or dying—like my aunt when she contracted breast cancer—the Qur’an was chanted by the bedside, in the belief that its words alone would cure the patient. Analogies with Christian prayer are misleading because the reciter of the Qur’an is voicing God’s words, not appealing to God for intercession.

Does the Qur’an Inspire Violence?

If the Qur’an were used only to heal the sick, there would be less need for a Muslim Reformation. Unfortunately, as we have seen, it is also very commonly cited today to justify acts of violence, including all-out war against the infidel.