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Is the Koran the Word of God? When Was the Koran Collected and Standardized?
Eric V. Snow
Although a thorough-going critique
of the Quran (Koran) would require a book of its own, some problems with its
text and historical accuracy. Although a standard Muslim claim says
the Quran has no textual variations, this is in fact incorrect. No one
original manuscript of the Quran ever existed, since Muhammad (c. 570-632 A.D.)
didn't write any of it. Instead various followers wrote scattered
revelations on whatever material came to hand, including pieces of papyrus,
tree bark, palm leaves and mats, stones, the ribs and shoulder blades of
animals, etc. Otherwise, they memorized them. These
disparate materials were susceptible to loss: Ali Dashti, an Islamic
statesman, said animals sometimes ate mats or the palm leaves on which Suras (chapters
of the Quran) were written! After his death, Muhammad revelations
were gathered together to eliminate the chaos. (Even Joseph Smith,
founder of the Mormon church did better than this: The Reorganized
Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints today possesses the original manuscript
of the Book of Mormon).
To solve the problems of conflicting
memories and possibly lost or varying written materials, Sunni Islamic
tradition maintains that Caliph Uthman (ruled 644-56) had the text of the Quran
forcibly standardized. He commanded manuscripts with alternative
readings to be burned. But he didn't fully succeed, even assuming
this standard story is true (Stephen J. Shoemaker rejects it in “Creating the
Qur’an: A Historical-Critical Study,”
which I describe in great detail later below) since variations are still known
to have existed and some still do. The Sura Al-Saff had 200 verses
in the days of Muhammad's later wife Ayesha, but Uthman's version had only
52. Robert Morey says Shiite Muslims claim Uthman cut out a quarter
of the Quran's verses for political reasons. In his manuscript of
the Quran, Ubai had a few Suras that Uthman omitted from the standardized
version. Arthur Jeffrey, in his Materials for the History of the
Text of the Quran, gives 90 pages of variant readings for the Quran's text,
finding 140 alone for Sura 2. When the Western scholar Bertrasser
sought to photograph a rare Kufic manuscript of the Quran, which had
"certain curious features" in Cairo, the Egyptian Library suddenly
withdrew it, and denied him access to it.
Even when originally first written,
certain problems existed, since Muhammad would make mistakes or corrections to
revelations he had made. Before documenting examples of verses
removed from the Quran, Arabic scholar E. Wherry explained first: "There
being some passages in the Quran which are contradictory, the Muhammadan
doctors obviate any objection from thence by the doctrine of abrogation; for
they say GOD in the Quran commanded several things which were for good reasons
afterwards revoked and abrogated." One follower of Muhammad,
Abdollah Sarh, often made suggestions about subtracting, adding, or rephrasing
Suras to him that he accepted. Later, Abdollah renounced Islam
because if these revelations had come from God, they shouldn't have been
changed at his suggestion. (Later, after taking Mecca, Muhammad made
sure Abdollah was one of the first people he had executed). Muhammad
had the curious policy of renouncing verses of the Quran that he spoke in
error. In the Satanic verses incident he briefly capitulated to
polytheism by allowing Allah's followers to worship the goddesses Al-Lat,
Al-Uzzah, and Manat (see Sura 53:19; cf. 23:51) (Note that the title of Salman
Rushdie's novel, The Satanic Verses, alludes to this incident. For
writing this book he was sentenced to death by Iranian dictator Ayatollah
Khomeini). Could anyone imagine Elijah, Isaiah, Ezekiel, or Jeremiah
doing something similar? Did Muhammad's God make mistakes that
required corrections?
Another problem of the Quran is that
its teachings and stories in many cases contradict the
Bible. Theologically, for Islam, this poses a major problem, because
the Quran itself says the Bible is composed of earlier revelations from the
same God. Hence, if the Bible's different version of some event or
person's life is correct but contradicts the Quran's, then the Quran's own
appeal to the Bible's authority is proven false. Hence, Muslims
can't just throw away the Bible completely, but have to claim this or that part
of it was corrupted, while the Quran has the right version. But now
logically, granted the standard principles of the bibliographical test
described above, since the Bible was finished about 500 years before the Quran,
it is the more reliable document. In many cases, eyewitnesses wrote
the Bible, or second-hand reporters using eyewitness
accounts. Muslims may routinely claim the Bible has been corrupted,
but the textual evidence shows otherwise: The variations in the Old
and New Testaments are actually smaller than the textual problems the Quran
ultimately faces, which Uthman's actions to standardize it merely paper
over. Furthermore, what textual variations the Bible does have don't
bend towards Islamic theology in any kind of systematic manner. For
example, the Quran denies the crucifixion of Christ. There are no
New Testament variations that deny the crucifixion. Furthermore, by
secular logic alone, who is more reliable about this? An eyewitness
such as John, or Mark as informed by Peter? Or someone writing 500+
years later who never even saw Jesus alive? Since Muhammad did
maintain his revelations built upon the Bible, seeing it as coming from the
same God, the two shouldn't conflict‑‑but of course, they do.
Consider some sample contradictions
and historical inaccuracies of the Quran as compared to the
Bible. The Quran says the world was made in eight days (2+4+2‑‑Sura
41:9, 10, 12), while the Bible says six in Genesis 1. Then, still
more problematically, the Quran elsewhere says it was made in six days (Sura
7:52, 10:3). The Quran says one of Noah's sons chose to die in the
flood, and that the Ark landed on Mount Judi, not Ararat (Sura
11:44-46). "Azar" becomes the name of Abraham's father,
not Terah (Sura 6:4). The Quran also blunders by asserting Alexander
the Great (Zul-quarain) was a true prophet of God (see Sura
18:82-98). Secular history proves this to be patently
absurd. Alexander was a thorough-going pagan who never knew Jehovah,
the God of Israel.
The Quran often gets its chronology
skewered, putting together as living at the same time who may have lived
centuries apart according to the Bible. This occurred because
Muhammad evidently got many of the stories second and third hand orally,
ultimately often from apocryphal sources such as the Gospel of Thomas and the
Gospel of Barnabas, not from the Bible itself. For example, the
Quran portrays Haman, the prime minister for King Ahasuerus (Xerxes I, ruled
486-474 b.c.) of the Persian Empire as Pharaoh's chief minister when Moses challenged
the king of Egypt (c. 1445 b.c.) (see Sura 28:38; 29:38; 40:25-27,
38-39). Another leading error of the Quran occurs by mixing up Mary,
the mother of Jesus, with Miriam, the sister of Aaron and Moses, who had lived
some 1400 years earlier. Note Sura 19:29-30: "Then
came she with the babe to her people, bearing him. They said,
"O Mary! now hast thou done a strange thing! O
sister of Aaron! Thy father was not a man of wickedness, nor
unchaste thy mother." In a footnote to his translation of the
Quran, Dawood tries to rescue Muhammad by saying it was an idiomatic expression
in Arabic meaning "virtuous woman." But elsewhere the
Quran refutes this interpretation, because Muhammad asserts the father of Mary
was Imran, Moses' father!. Note Sura 66:12: "And Mary,
the daughter of Imran, who kept her maidenhood, and into whose womb We breathed
of Our Spirit . . ." The father of Moses and Miriam,
according to the Bible, was Amram (Ex. 6:20; Num. 26:59). The Virgin
Mary's father was Eli or Heli (Luke 3:23‑‑see above for
details). Muhammad confuses King Saul with the earlier judge
Gideon. At God's inspiration, Gideon reduced Israel's army in size
by eliminating those who drank from the water in one way rather than another
(compare Judges 7:4-7 with Sura 2:249-250). Another mistake,
although it may be obscured in translation, concerns "The Samaritan"
deceiving the children of Israel into worshiping the Golden Calf at the base of
Mt. Sinai (mid-fifteenth century b.c.). Later settling in the Holy
Land centuries later, the Samaritans didn't exist until after the Assyrians had
taken Israel into captivity (late eighth century b.c. and afterwards‑‑see
II Kings 17:22-41). Rodwell translates "Samiri" here, but
according to Morey, this obscures the real meaning in Arabic (see Sura 20:87,
90, 96).
Further problems with the Quran
could be explained, but this suffices for our purposes
here. Although few Muslims know this, the religion of Muhammad's
ancestors and his tribe the Quraysh involved the worship of Allah, the name of
the moon god, in pre-Islamic times in Arabia. Anciently an idol was
set up for Allah near the Kabah, where today Muslims travel in pilgrimages to
Mecca, Saudi Arabia to walk around. In myth, Allah married the
sun-goddess, and they together had three goddesses named Al-Lat, Al-Uzzah, and
Manat. It's hard to over-emphasize the significance of the truth
that "Allah" was the name of the moon god in Arabia before the time
of Muhammad. It's no coincidence that during the "Satanic
Verses" incident when Muhammad weakened against idolatry briefly, he had
allowed the same three goddesses to be worshiped. Even today, the
standard symbol Islam uses to represent itself is (along with a single star)
the crescent moon! (It's not sensibly seen as just a symbol for
Ramadan, the month of fasting during the daytime). Evidently,
Muhammad took a pre-existing pagan moon god of Arabia, and then applied to this
false god various stories ultimately from the Bible and apocryphal literature
about the True God. As Morey summarizes: "The cult
of the moon god which worshipped Allah was transformed by Muhammad into a
monotheistic faith." Compared to the Almighty God of the
Judeo-Christian Scriptures, the God of the Quran is a limited god who
"inspired" the writing of historically inaccurate, contradictory
revelations.
The information above on the Quran
is mostly based upon Robert Morey, Islam Unveiled: The True
Desert Storm (Shermans Dale, PA: The Scholars Press, 1991), pp.
48-51, 61, 75-76, 116-21, 131-41. The verse numbers as cited above
are those of J.M. Rodwell's 1861 translation of the Quran into English, with
some reference to Dawood's revised 1974 translation. Admittedly,
Morey's book is decidedly imperfect: He is careless sometimes, proofread
it poorly, and apparently doesn't know Islamic/Middle Eastern history
in-depth. Using a ridiculously out of context citation of the Quran,
he falsely accuses Islam of being intrinsically racist (p.
150). Nevertheless, enough remains in his work to destroy any
rational faith in Islam, which another publisher reissued as The Islamic
Invasion. Background on the Satanic Verses incident also comes from
W. Montgomery Watt, Muhammad: Prophet and
Statesman (London: Oxford University Press, 1961), pp. 60-65).
Although the standard story of the
collection and standardization of the text of the Koran maintains it occurred
primarily under the Caliph Uthman (644-656 A.D.), here the contrarian view is
asserted that
this process actually occurred almost entirely under Caliph al-Malik (685-705)
of the Uymayyad dynasty, with the crucial assistance of his right-hand man,
al-Hajjajj. The main (secondary) source
for this thesis is Stephen J. Shoemaker’s “Creating
the Qur’an: A Historical-Critical Study,” which cites the necessary and relevant
primary sources to support it. The
intention is that this post is “part I,” which will deal with why the standard Sunni story of the Quran’s compilation, as told by Bukhari
that focuses on the role of Uthman in standardizing its text, simply isn’t true. Part II theoretically would deal with the positive evidence that
al-Malik, with the able if ruthless assistance of al-Hajjajj, did this instead.
A standard common claim of Islam’s apologists is that the text of the
Quran has absolutely no errors or variations in it. However, when the actual history of the Quran’s transmission, collection, and
standardization is examined in reasonably contemporaneous primary sources, it’s
obvious that it had many, many variations and different regional text types before
al-Malik (r. 685-705) and al-Hajjajj used their imperial authority to forcibly
standardize the “received text” of the Quran out of these sources. The standard story of the standardization
of the Quran’s text appears in Bukhari’s important collection of hadith
(sayings/teachings attributed to Muhammad), which the Sunni sect of Islam
upholds and many Western historians uncritically have signed off on (i.e., the “Noldekean-Schwallian”
paradigm, as Shoemaker labels it). In
this telling, Abu Bakr (632-34), the first caliph and Muhammad’s right-hand
man, was asked by the man who would succeed him, Umar (634-644), to collect
together the recitations of the Quran together because many of those with
knowledge of what Muhammad had said recently had died in battle, thus taking
their memories to the grave. Abu Bakr
initially objected, by saying if Muhammad hadn’t told his fellow Muslims to do
this during his lifetime, why do it now?
However, Umar persisted, and Abu Bakr said it was fine to do so and that
the services of the scribe Zayd b. Thabit should be used for assembling the
text of the Quran together. Oddly
enough, Zayd made the same objection that Abu Bakr did, but Umar prevailed with
him as well. So then, Zayd went to work
looking for various fragments of Muhammad’s revelations as they were preserved
in various ways, including stones, palm branches, camel bones, and “in the
hearts of men.” Then Zayd gave the
sheets of paper resulting from this project to Abu Bakr, who later at his death
passed them along to Umar. After Umar
died, he left these sheets with his daughter Hafsa, who had been a wife of
Muhammad. Then roughly 20 years later,
the Caliph Uthman (644-656) towards the end of his reign became concerned about
the various differing renditions of the Quran in circulation among
Muslims. One of his top generals,
Hudhayfa ibn al-Yaman, told Uthman that in Iraq and Syria significantly
different versions of the Quran were in circulation. He was troubled because Muslims would eventually become divided
over which version was the best. Uthman
acted on Hudhayfa’s concerns by getting the sheets that Hafsa had kept, which
became the basis for an official version of the Quran that a group of scribes
under the direction of Zayd produced. Then Uthman sent out copies of this
official text to the major cities of his realm (Kufa, Mecca, Basra, and
Damascus). He also directed that all
the other defective versions of Quran should be gathered up and destroyed. So then, since these final events took place
around 650 A.D, Muslims will claim that the Quran has no textual variations.
But is the mainstream Sunni story of the Quran’s
compilation historically true? Even in
this account, the Quran’s assembly and production was haphazardly
performed. Furthermore, Sunni coercive
imperial authority was applied very early on to the promulgation of a
standardized text. There was no “bottom
up” consensus of believers involved in this process, nor did the Muslim scribes
have available the knowledge of the techniques and processes of textual
reconstruction (as part of “lower criticism”) that the Christian West’s
scholars eventually developed. (By
contrast, no Christians had such coercive authority over the New Testament’s
text for its first 200 years because they were a persecuted religious minority
under the pagan Roman government’s watchful eye). When Uthman ordered the destruction of the alternative regional
variations of the Quran, how did he know that they were wrong in all cases and
that his was right?
Furthermore, there’s no unanimity in the primary
Islamic sources supporting the story of the Quran’s standardization by
Uthman. There are at least three other
accounts of Umar’s or Abu Bakr’s involvement that don’t agree with Buhkari’s
version as retold above. One version says
that Umar did the work of collecting the Quran from disparate media without the
involvement of Abu Bakr at all. Another
rendition says that Abu Bakr ordered Zayd to write Muhammad’s recitations on
palm branches, shoulder bones, and leather before Umar later had Zayd write
these down into one document. Another
telling of the story has Abu Bakr fully refuse Umar’s request to have the Quran
written down. So when Umar became
caliph, only then he had the Quran written down on leaves. Then there’s in both
Shiite and Sunni sources the claim that Ali, who was Muhammad’s son-in-law and
cousin, was the first one to collect the Quran together. There’s one account that Salim b. Ma’qil
supposedly assembled the text right after Muhammad died. Another report says that Aisha, Muhammad’s
favorite wife, had a copy of the Quran in the form of a codex. The rival regional versions of the Quran
before Uthman supposedly had its text standardized have been called “the
companion codices.” Purportedly four
early followers of Muhammad were respectively responsible for them: Abd Allah
ibn Mas‘ud’s version (in Kufa), Miqdad b. al-Aswad (in Hims), and Ubayy b. K’ab
(in Syria), and Abu Musa al-Ash’ari (Basra).
There’s hardly any unanimity in the tradition about how the Quran’s text
was collected in the primary sources of Islam when other primary sources
outside of Bukhari’s own harmonized story are examined. (See generally Shoemaker, “Creating the Qur’an,”
pp. 24-25).
In other early Islamic historical works, outside
of the hadith, more inconsistencies about how the Quran was compiled
arise. Ibn Shabba (d. 876) in his “History
of Medina,” has a collection of accounts about how the Quran came together, but
surprisingly none of them mention Abu Bakr’s role. One report here says that Umar had begun collecting the Quran’s
text together, but was assassinated before the job was done. Another tradition, by contrast, says that
Umar owned a codex of the Quran. Yet
another story says that Umar had disagreements with the version of the text
that Ubayy b. Ka’b had collected. One
report says that Zayd and Umar proofed a version of the Quran of Ubayy and routinely
edited it based on the authority of Zayd.
As one reads over the stories of Umar’s involvement in the collecting of
the Quran, he actually wasn’t trying to compile the Quran but was trying to
support the authority of one version among several that had already been
collected together. According to Ibn
Shabba, by the time Umar had become the caliph, several versions of the Quran
had already been independently compiled, with each having its supporters in
different areas. Umar wanted to assert
the authority of the version of the Quran found in Medina against the versions
enjoying favor in Iraq and Syria. Ibn
Shabba dedicates an entire long chapter to the traditions about the efforts of
Uthman’s compilation of the Quran.
Besides the version of the story that Bukhari preserved, he gives a
number of other accounts about Uthman’s participation in standardizing the text
of the Quran. But much like the stories
about Umar, Uthman wasn’t collecting the text from scratch, but rather was
trying to correct versions of the Quran that were already in circulation to fit
in with his caliphate’s preferred rendition.
(See generally Shoemaker, “Creating the Quran,” pp. 25-26).
A somewhat earlier primary source than Ibn Sa’d’s
is “Kitab al-tabaqat al-kahib” of Ibn Sa’d (d. 845), which is made up of
biographies of the early caliphs and of Muhammad himself. He provides a wealth of reports about how
the Quran was gathered together, which are hardly unanimous about how the
process occurred. As de Premere writes
about Ibn Sa’d’s perspective in the early ninth century, “the real history of
the Qur’anic corpus seemed blurry and the identity of its architects uncertain.” Like Ibn Shabba, he says nothing about Abu
Bakr’s supposed role in assembling the Quran together. Most interestingly, when focusing on the
rule of Uthman himself, Ibn Sa’d says nothing about Uthman’s supposed role in
compiling the Quran, which makes for a major inconsistency with Bukhari’s
standard story. Even more surprisingly,
in Zayd’s biography, Ibn Sa’d’s omits any mention of Zayd’s efforts to collect
the Quran. Ibn Sa’d doesn’t make any
mention of the sheets that Hafsa supposedly had, which were supposedly used to
create the canonical version of the Quran that Uthman commanded to have
made. In yet another account, Uthman
indeed did command the Quran to be compiled, but his order went to Ubayy instead
of to Zayd.
One problem in examining the accounts of the
Quran’s collection concerns the ambiguity of the Arabic word “jama’a,” which
can mean both “to memorize” and “to collect.”
This makes the accounts of whether anyone wrote down anything Muhammad
said during his lifetime unclear, since it could have meant the “memorization”
of what he said, not its “collection.”
In these reports, two men stand out, who were already mentioned above
repeatedly, Zayd b. Thabit and Ubayy b. Ka’b, which later traditions say they
were Muhammad’s scribes. Ibn Sa’d has
contradictory reports about Umar’s role in compiling the Quran: One report says that Umar was the first to
collect the Quran on sheets, but another says Umar was assassinated before he
could compile the Quran together. Sa’d clearly
didn’t know anything about the standard canonical story of Bukhari’s about
Uthman, Zayd, and Hafsa’s sheets at the beginning of the ninth century. As de Premare observes, the silences and
inconsistencies of Sa’d are disturbing about the real support that Bukhari’s
story actually has in the primary sources.
There’s no uniformity or unanimity in the relevant sources about how the
Quran was compiled. (See Shoemaker, pp. 26-28).
A somewhat earlier version about the collection
of the Quran appears in “Book of the Conquests,” by Sayf ibn ‘Umar (d.
796-797). In one key regard, his report
agrees with Bukhari’s version in describing the general Hudhayfa’s sense of
consternation about the different renditions of the Quran in use by Muslims in
different areas of Uthman’s domain. In
one regard, the reported conflicts were worse, however, since rival groups of
believers were proclaiming the cases for their preferred versions of the Quran
while condemning those found elsewhere.
Since Hudhayfa was greatly distressed about these sharp disputes and
major variations in the text of the Quran, he told Uthman in Mecca about this
serious problem. To summarize the
situation regionally, the Kufans favored the codex of Abd Allah ibn Mas’ud, the
Syrians preferred that of Miqdad b. Al-Aswad (and seemingly Salim), and the
Basran’s liked the rendition of Abu Musa al-Ash’ari. Oddly, the version of Ubayy b. Ka’b receives no mention in this
source. Uthman commanded the partisans
of each of these versions of the Quran to appear before him in order to make
the case for their respective summary of the words of Muhammad. These are clearly discordant books in
dispute, since Sayf ibn ‘Umar’s account identifies these productions as “codexes.” So clearly, from the bottom up, rival groups
of Muslims in different geographical areas had written down what they believed
were Muhammad’s words. Confronted with
this mess, Uthman’s solution wasn’t to create a new collection of the Quran,
but to take the version available in Medina, of which he had copies made and
then he had them sent out to these other areas of his realm. He ordered that all the other versions
should be destroyed. It’s not clear
that his commands were followed or that he had the effective political/police
power to enforce his decisions on this matter on believers who lived far from
the Hejaz. So in the earliest account
that we have of the Quran’s compilation in Islamic primary sources, Uthman made
no effort to textually reconstruct the “best” version of the Quran out of
various regional versions. There is no
primary source before the ninth century that confirms that Uthman and the
scribes he directed engaged in any kind of careful systematic process of
textual reconstruction. (See Shoemaker,
pp. 28-30).
One problem that also arises in the efforts to
trace back the earliest version of the Quran as a text concerns the original
ambiguities between what are now called “hadith” or the sayings/teachings
attributes to Muhammad, and the Quran’s text, which purports to only be the
words of God Himself. There clearly was
confusion about how to make a distinction between these two kinds of
records. For example, in an early
letter said to have been written by Zayd ibn Ali (695-740), two of the hadith
quoted are almost identical to what’s in the Quran (5:56; 21:24). Ibn Sa’d relays Salima b. Jarmi’s assertion
that he has gathered “many qurans” from Muhammad together, which presumably
were his teachings or hadith, not reports of direct revelations from God. So then, given these stories about how the
Quran was collected by Abu Bakr, Umar, Uthman, Zayd, Ubayy, etc. they may not
have been able in their time to make the clear distinctions that later Sunni
scholarship made between the Quran (i.e., divine revelation) and the hadith
(i.e., teachings/sayings of Muhammad).
These regional versions of the Quran may well have been hadith to one
degree or another. (See Shoemaker,
p.30).
So when all these conflicting stories examined
in the early primary Islamic historical sources about the Quran’s original compilation,
it becomes obvious that that the standard Bukhari story, which the mainstream
Sunni tradition has endorsed, is much too simplistic. The key error of many Western historians, such as those who
endorse the generally reigning “Noldekean-Schwallian” paradigm, has been to
uncritically endorse and support the mainstream Sunni viewpoint when it simply
isn’t well supported in the primary historical sources. As Shoemaker quotes Burton as summarizing
the relevant primary sources about the Quran’s compilation: “The reports are a mass of confusions,
contradictions, and inconsistencies. By
their nature, they represent the product of a lengthy process of evolution,
accretion and ‘improvement.’ They were
framed in response to a wide variety of progressing needs. . . . The existence
of such reports makes it clear that the Muslims were confused. The earliest stage of the traditions on the collection
of the Qur’an did consist in incompatible attributions of the first collection
to Abu Bakr, to ‘Umar, to ‘Uthman.” De
Premare somewhat cynically observes: “such
variation among the reports [indicates] that each one seems to reflect later
circumstances rather than the fact that it is alleged to relate.” (See Shoemaker, pp. 30-31).
The Muslims’ standard claims that there are no
variations in the Koran’s text are simply not true. Most significantly, the variations that still are known to exist
are those that survived the ruthless standardization process of the Quran during
the reign of Abd al-Malik (685-705).
Abu Hayyan al-Gharnait, who has been an important collector of the Quran’s
textual variants, has explicitly noted that he has deliberately not gathered “those
variants where there is too wide a divergence from the standard text of ‘Uthman.’”
(See Shoemaker, p. 33). The Quranic
inscriptions found in the Dome on the Rock on Jerusalem’s Temple Mount area are
among the oldest in existence. (Since
Jerusalem was mainly a Christian city at the time, these inscriptions often
bore witness against Christian teachings and beliefs). However, as Shoemaker notes, these
inscriptions, placed by the caliph Abd al-Malik (685-705 A.D.) “are our
earliest surviving evidence for the text of the Qur’an, and yet they different
from the now canonical version of the Qur’an.”
He asked how this could be possible, if the text of the Quran had been
standardized some 40 years earlier in the time of Uthman. (Shoemaker, p. 64).
One of the oldest Qurans, the Sanaa manuscript of the eighth century, has actually two differing texts. The newer one, dating to the middle eighth century, was written over an erased version that dates to the early eighth century. So why would the same folio pages have two different Qurans laboriously handwritten on them? Well, the older erased “palimpsest” version varies regularly from the newer “Uthmanic” rendition. In this case, it’s obvious that that when the newer standardized text of the Quran was promulgated throughout the caliphate of Abd al-Malik, the older version was erased from this particular manuscript’s pages. What was erased, however, is still recoverable and legible. It indicates that at least until 700 A.D. or later, non-canonical versions of the Quran were still being copied, which is long past the dates of Uthman’s reign (644-656 A.D.) (See Shoemaker, p. 77). Most likely the great majority of the variants that existed in the regional codexes of Ubayy b. Ka’b, Abd Allah ibn Mas’ud, Abu Musa al-Ash’ ari, and Miqdad b. Al-Aswad were totally destroyed; what has been preserved is a feeble remnant. So then, how do we know what was preserved is really what Muhammad allegedly heard from God as opposed to what was destroyed?
Another interesting set of witnesses about the
Quran’s formation comes from early Shiite witnesses from the first three centuries
of Islamic history. The partisans of
Ali as the legitimate caliph opposed the rendition of the Quran that mainstream
Sunni tradition attributed especially to Uthman’s efforts. According to the Shiites, it was Ali, not
Abu Bakr, Umar, or Uthman, who first gathered together the Quran’s text shortly
after Muhammad’s death. However, the
Shiites maintain that Ali’s version of the Quran was much longer than Uthman’s
rendition. The first three caliphs that
the Sunnis recognize (Abu Bakr, Umar, and Uthman) twisted and falsified what
Ali had compiled. For obvious political
reasons, the Shiites asserted, these caliphs deleted the section that clearly
named Ali as Muhammad’s legitimate political heir. So the Quranic text traditionally
attributed to Uthman is a distorted version designed to promote the religious
and political program of the first three Sunni caliphs, according to the early
Shiite writers.
It’s true, however, that starting in the tenth
century Shiite scholars of the “Twelver” tradition began to repudiate their
sect’s earlier witness and began to embrace the Uthman text such as it is. Because it had become very dangerous to cast
doubt on the Quran by this time, they had obvious motives of self-preservation
to change their opinions. Although
mainstream Western scholarship has generally arbitrarily rejected the oldest
Shiite viewpoint on the development of the Quran’s text, this decision to
embrace the Sunni viewpoint has to be regarded as prejudiced. As already related above, the Sunni primary
sources are full of inconsistencies and contradictions, so why should they
deemed to be automatically reliable compared to the Shiite viewpoint by
impartial historians? The Shiite
viewpoint also has the advantage of being the “minority” viewpoint that lost,
which may be all the more valuable since it reports details and has a general
perspective that the (Sunni) victors have ignored, twisted, or censored.
Interestingly enough, two of the discordant regional texts of the Quran were
developed in southern Iraq, where Ali’s support was at its strongest, such as
in Kufa and Basra. Indeed, Kufa was
briefly the capital of Ali’s short-lived caliphate. (See Shoemaker, p. 40).
In this context, it’s important to realize how
violently the Ummayyads persecuted and quelled the partisans of Ali’s cause in
their realm. Unlike the case for the
orthodox Catholics who counter-attacked the Gnostic Christians in the second
and third centuries A.D., who were armed only with the power of the pen, the
Sunni caliphs had authority over the sword and willingly wielded it to favor
their cause. Amir-Moezzi explains the
power of the Umayyad caliphs to impose their political and religious will on
their opponents: “In an attempt to
justify these measures [that distorted records of the past], caliphal power set
up a complex system of propaganda, censorship, and historical
falsification. First it altered the
text of the Qur’an and forged an entire body of traditions falsely ascribed to
the Prophet, drawing great scholars, judges, jurists, preachers, and historians
into its service—all this within a policy of repression that was as savage as
it was methodical, aimed at its opponents at large, but at Alids in particular.” (As quoted by Shoemaker, p. 37). The standardized text of the Quran is
actually, according to Michael Cook, “a remarkable testimony to the authority
of the early Islamic state.” The
imperial efforts to find and destroy dissident Qurans were especially aimed at
the proto-Shiites of southern Iraq.
They were so successful, according to Omar Hamdan, “that one could only
wonder in disbelief . . . if any remnant of a differing recension [of the Qur’an]
were to come to light. Therefore, given
the power of the Sunni caliphs by the eighth century, they easily could have
thoroughly censored the viewpoint of Ali’s partisans from the historical
sources that they controlled, in a manner bordering upon the fictional Ingsoc’s
in Orwell’s novel “ 1984.” (See
generally Shoemaker, pp. 35-38).
However, it’s unlikely that much of what
Muhammad said was written down during his lifetime because the small, poor
communities of Mecca and Medina were made up of people for whom the spoken word
was primary and few were literate in a broader sense. Shoemaker spends a good amount of space making the case that
those living in the Hejaz in Muhammad’s time in these communities wouldn’t have
been able to write a complex text like the Quran; most of their writings are
short personal messages placed on rocks that are the equivalent of “Kilroy was
here.” He also makes a detailed case
against any idea that Mecca was important in the spice trade, in the mining of
minerals, or as a pilgrimage site.
Patricia Crone’s work has been particularly devastating against any idea
that Mecca was a thriving center of an international spice trade. Mecca, being a community incapable of
growing crops, unlike Medina, was functionally the local version of an almost
entirely non-literate, uncultured, impoverished “Gopher Prairie;” Medina wasn’t
much better off despite it could irrigate some crops. Given this realistic portrayal of cultural and economic
conditions in the Hejaz, it’s fully believable that Muhammad was indeed
illiterate, much like many others in his community. (See Shoemaker generally,
pp. 96-133).
Unlike the case for the Jews in the ancient rabbinical
tradition which Jesus and His disciples would have followed, there wasn’t an
established cultural practice of students carefully memorizing the teachings of
their teachers and then passing them along to others, as per the insights of
the of Uppsala school of Harald Riesenfeld and Birger Gerhardsson when
analyzing the period of time when the content of the Gospels were orally
transmitted. Nothing
equivalent to such customs existed among the Arabs of the Hejaz in the early 7th
century. Muslims shouldn’t make the
mistake of projecting back the practices of the present day Madrassa schools,
in which many students often learn to memorize the entire Quran verbatim from
printed texts, back to Muhammad’s own time.
Working
from a skeptical, naturalistic perspective, Shoemaker and others who have
examined the history of the development of religions and their texts find the
standard Sunni Bukhari/Uthman story of the compilation and standardization of
the Quran’s text to be exceedingly implausible. It would have happened way too quickly. Chase Robinson explains why this standard tradition of how the
Quran’s text was collected is so unlikely (as quoted in Shoemaker, pp.
38-39): “The complicated and protracted
processes that generated monotheist scripture in antiquity and late antiquity
are generally measured in centuries or at least several decades; the [Sunni]
tradition would have us believe that in the case of Islam they were telescoped
into about twenty years. Are we really
to think that within a single generation God’s word moved from individual lines
and chapters scribbled on camel shoulder-blades and rocks to complete, single,
fixed and authoritative text on papyrus or vellum? It would be virtually unprecedented. It is furthermore unlikely in the light of what we know of early
Arabic: the nature of early Arabic
scripture, which only imperfectly described vowels and consonants, and
conventions of memorization and reading, which often privileged memory over written
text, would militate against the very rapid production of the fixed and
authoritative text that the tradition describes.” Here a strong contrast arises with the environment in which the
New Testament was produced, which had much more widespread literacy, including
the Founder’s own literacy (i.e., Luke 4:16), among Jewish people and also the
educated gentiles with whom the likes of Paul rubbed shoulders, unlike the case
for c. 700 A.D. Hejaz. The Old
Testament was already a long standardized text upon which the earliest Jewish
Christians would have found to serve as the obvious model to base their own
faith upon when the Gospels were written down in Greek after a certain period
of oral transmission in (mainly) Aramaic.
The story of the transmission of Paul’s letters in this regard was
simpler, however, since they started their lives as written text. As already surveyed above and as Shoemaker
observes (p. 39), the primary sources that portray situation in which the Muslims
received and produced the Quran have so many inconsistencies and contradictions
demonstrates that historians shouldn’t mechanically place their faith in the
standard Sunni Bukhari/Uthman story.
Another factor that likely retarded the
collection and standardization of the Quran was the great authority given to
the early caliphs over the community of Muslim believers. They were treated almost like vicars of God
on earth functionally, because of the power they had to determine the beliefs
and practices of the Muslim community, which was over and above their martial
powers to wage war and to administer the law.
As a result, the Quran itself gets very little attention from believers
until the end of the eight century.
Shoemaker explains the consequences of this dynamic (p. 41, italics removed): “This dynamic of a gradual shift from the
caliphs’ direct authority as deputies of God to recognizing instead the
authority of Muhammad’s teachings as remembers by the members of the ‘ulama
also goes a long way toward explaining the Qur’an’s apparent absence from the
Believers’ faith until the end of the seventh century, as evidenced by both the
Islamic tradition itself and the various contemporary reports from writers
outside of the community of the Believers.”
Most strikingly, Muhammad isn’t mentioned at all by the early Muslim governmental
authorities before the time of the Caliph Marwan I (684-85). According to Shoemaker (p. 41), the founder
of Islam “is not named by any one of the papyri, inscriptions, or coins from
this period.” However, by the time Abd
al-Malik becomes caliph, Marwan I’s son, a pronounced shift occurs: Now the authority of Muhammad and the Quran
are often publicly proclaimed to the Muslim community and to the wider world,
when they had been neglected for 50 or 75 years by the Umayyad governmental
authorities. A related reason why
Uthman wouldn’t have been important in standardizing the Quran stems from his
personal unpopularity and the weakness of the governmental apparatus at his
command to coerce obedience in matters of faith at a distance from the
Hejaz. He may have chosen a regional
version of the Quran, such as that of Mecca or Medina, and then tried to impose
its text on others, but lacked success in doing so. (See Shoemaker, pp. 40-41).
Much like the standard weakness of the rabbinical sources making up the
Mishna and the Talmud, who often projected earlier in time practices and
institutions that actually came later, it’s overwhelmingly likely the same
problem in reconstruction the past occurred here, in which what al-Malik
actually did was projected onto Uthman and the earlier caliphs, who were seen
as having more historical legitimacy since they lived and ruled in time closer
to Muhammad.
At this point, let’s turn to presenting the
evidence that Caliph al-Malik (685-705) and his right-hand man, al-Hajjajj
compiled and edited the Quran. Although
Muslims at times will admit that they had some influence on the text of the
Quran, they attempt to limit those changes to minor amendments, such as the
addition of diacritical marks and standardized spellings. However, many manuscripts copied after the
early eighth century still lacked these features while others clearly did,
which proves the falsity of this attempt to minimize al-Malik’s role in
substantially producing the text of the Quran as we have it today. Francois Deroche perceives the problem with
this kind of analysis (italics omitted):
“If we turn to the reports stating that the diacritics were introduced
in the course of al-Hajjajj’s ‘Masahif
project’ and that ta and ya were selected in order to distinguish between the
second and third person of some verbal forms, we have to admit that the
manuscript evidence says otherwise.”
However, these modest concessions to al-Malik’s role appear to be an
attempt to arbitrarily harmonize the historical primary sources, which also
mention the (supposed) roles of Abu Bakr, Umar, and Uthman as well.
Let’s examine some of the primary sources that
attribute major roles to al-Malik and/or al-Hajjajj in editing and compiling the
text of the Quran. One tradition
attributes says that al-Malik said that he feared death in the month of Ramadan
because (italics omitted), “That is the month in which I was born, it is the
month in which I was weaned, it is the month in which I gathered together the
Qur’an [jama’tu l-Qur’an], and it is the month in which I was sworn allegiance
[as the caliph].” Another tradition
maintain that al-Hajjajj sent codices with the new text of the Quran to all the
major centers of the imperial realm, such as Medina, Kufa, Mecca, Basra,
Damascus, and Egypt, with the goal of its replacing the local versions of the
Quran then in use. In some cases, it
was said that he was not only the first one to sent official codices to all the
important cities of his master’s realm, but also he was the one who created the
practice of having the Qur’an read aloud in mosques. He also instructed that all the older, local versions of the
Quran should be collected and destroyed, much like it was said that Uthman had
done in the official Sunni/Bukhari story.
All the privately owned manuscripts of the Quran with the wrong text
were to be seized and disposed of after paying the owners 60 dirham each. The Islamic governor of Egypt, confronted
with al-Hajjajj’s order to accept the new text of the Quran, regarded his
command as presumptuous, since he was of the same rank as al-Hajjajj. He replied that al-Hajjajj “permits himself
to send a mushaf [codex] to the very military district [jund] where I am
serving, me!” The Egyptian governor
then responded by making his own edition of the Qur’an. This story completely undermines the
standard Sunni narrative of Bukhari, which maintains Uthman’s efforts
standardized the Quran’s text, since it indicates it didn’t exist in Egypt at
the time al-Malik ruled. In Medina
around this time, Uthman’s own family objected to al-Hajjajj’s edition of the
Quran, according to Ibn Shabba. The
people of Mecca were said to have asked Uthman’s family to produce a copy of
the Quran of Uthman’s so they may read it.
Uthman’s family responded to this request by saying that it had been
destroyed on the same day when Uthman had been assassinated. (See Shoemaker, pp. 44-46).
Stephen J. Shoemaker, “Creating the Qur’an: A Historical-Critical Study,” is available
for a free download at the University of California’s Luminos Web site, which
provides Open Access to academic books.
Click here for the details: https://luminosoa.org/site/books/m/10.1525/luminos.128/
Being a sincere if unorthodox fundamentalist
Christian, I am not in agreement with all of what Shoemaker says in his work,
such as when he denies that Jesus was born in Bethlehem or denies that the
traditional authors of the Gospels are really Matthew, Mark, Luke, and
John. However, his book poses a
serious, fundamental challenge to the normal claims of Muslim apologists. In this case, the standard academic skepticism
of the “history of religions” school has mostly passed them by, but now its
tools are being turned to examine the origin of Islam in the same kind of way
that the origins of Judaism and Christianity have long been examined. In the case of the latter, over the past
couple of centuries, skilled academic counter-attacks have developed, such as
those of Gleason Archer in “A Survey of Old Testament Introduction,” which
rebuts the Wellhausen/JEDP theory of the origins of New Testament and which
defends the Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch. Of a similar genre, although it’s a compilation designed for a
more popular audience, is Josh McDowell’s “More Evidence That Demands a
Verdict,” which deals with the higher critic views of the origin of both the
New and Old Testaments. I suspect,
however, that nothing equivalent could possibly be produced by Muslims to blunt
the kind of sustained scholarly assault that Shoemaker launches in this book,
which at least in part in due to the nature of the Quran itself. If one is an objective outsider examining
its text relative to the bible’s, the Quran is clearly more haphazardly
repetitious than the Jewish and Christian Scriptures, and it lacks the general
chronological order of the bible. To my
critical conservative Christian eye, much of the Quran comes across as if it
were “debate prep” in which God tells Muhammad what to say the next time
skeptics denied his revelations. In
this regard, the analogy would be as if we could know what was the background
before debates like Jesus had with His fellow Jews in John 6, 8, and 10, with
it being like what God the Father would have told Jesus specifically what to
say in advance before confronting His critics one more time.
Muslims may make accusations of racism against
anyone who disagrees with how Muslims have interpreted and preserved their own primary
sources over the centuries. It's necessary to prove the reasoning of Shoemaker
is wrong in some detail instead of just saying he is affected by racism or bias
of some kind. An interesting point that Shoemaker makes is that Western
scholarship, by and large for many decades, signed off on and agreed with Sunni
orthodoxy about how the Quran was written and compiled. What Shoemaker calls
the “Noldekean-Schwallian” paradigm is simply the endorsement of the standard
Bukhari story about how the Quran was put together. That is, Muslims got off
hook for a long time from Western scholars using against the Quran the same
kinds of skeptical analyses that they have used against the bible. However,
when other early primary sources are examined, mostly by Muslims, but a few are
by informed Christians of the time, that story simply can't be true. So what
Shoemaker is doing is subjecting the story of Islam's development to the same
kind of critical eye that Judaism's and Christianity's development has long
been exposed to by using the same kind of historical reasoning processes and
(well) naturalistic assumptions. There's no racism in using this kind of
scholarly reasoning against Islam as much as it has been used against
Christianity and Judaism over the past two centuries. I would also maintain,
although this raises a much bigger issue, that human reason, such as
Aristotle's philosophy as developed in prior and posterior analytics (i.e., the
syllogism and the law of the excluded middle) is fully valid in any culture; it
isn't limited by culture in its validity.
A key point of Shoemaker's work is that the early primary sources about
the Quran's compilation are all over the map about how the process was done.
The early Shiite primary sources about this process are much more likely to be
correct, since they were written much closer to the events in question, than
later ones in which they had been intimidated by the Sunnite majority, so they
felt that they had to adjust in order to survive.
Deroche hedges so heavily about the
palaeographic evidence that it's a weak reed to lean upon to make it "our
default view ought to be that the Qur'an was standardized earlier than Abd
al-Malik's reign." That is, in bold print above, when Deroche says,
"The possibility that some of the fragments . . . can in no way be
excluded," that's hardly a ringing endorsement of that viewpoint.
Shoemaker's dismissive judgment of how subjective such evidence can be shows
how hard it is to really "prove" when a manuscript was written by
this method.
Before assuming that the default view should be
the Bukhari/Sunni story about Uthman, it's also necessary to address the other
arguments Shoemaker advances, such as the relatively administrative weakness of
Uthman's administration compared to Abd-Malik's to impose a standardize text on
the Umayyad caliphate's domain. The lack of unanimity among the ancient primary
sources about who wrote down, collected, and standardize the text of the Quran
is yet another major problem. It's hard to believe it could have been
standardized as early as it is said to be by the traditional Bukhari Sunni
story when compared to the chronology of other religious texts of importance,
especially when the Hejaz was a relatively poor, nearly illiterate area of the
world; it simply lacked the resources to produce such a rich, complicated
literary text. It would be the equivalent of expecting the like of (say) James
Joyce's "Finnegan's Wake" to emerge from rural Mississippi. So those
who aren't familiar with Shoemaker's arguments should be willing to examine
them in detail before dismissing them merely because they don't agree with the
orthodox Sunni view of the Quran's origins, which much of Western scholarship
has unwisely signed off on uncritically.
Let’s focus on the claim that Bakka (Surah 3:96)
refers to Mecca. If we go by only what the Quran itself says as opposed to
later commentary on it that "explains" this ambiguous text, it isn't
clear that the Kaaba and the House of Quran are references to a shrine in
Mecca. If we discount later Islamic tradition, it appears that
"Bakka" and "Mecca" are different places. The scholars who
devised later Islamic tradition, who were evidently desperate to identity
"Bakka" as "Mecca," simply started to claim that
"Bakka" was another name for "Mecca" or that
"Bakka" was a reference to the Kaaba itself. A key reason to deny
this standard Muslim interpretation of "Bakka" is a point that
Stephen J. Shoemaker makes in "Creating the Qur'an: A Historical-Critical
Study," which is a scholarly analysis of how the Quran was compiled based
on primary Islamic sources and some early Christian sources (p. 110):
"Nothing allows us to assume that when the Qur'an says Bakka it means
Mecca, particularly since it correctly names Mecca elsewhere."
As Shoemaker further explains, scholars have
long searched long and hard to find what "Bakka" here may actually
refer to. Perhaps the best solution, if we discount how Muslims try to get
around this problem, is Psalm 84:6-7 in the Old Testament, which is known to be
a pilgrimage psalm.
(Psalms 84:6-7) As they pass through the Valley
of Baca, They make it a spring; The rain also covers it with pools. They go
from strength to strength; Each one appears before God in Zion. (NKJV)
Notice there are some similarities of this Psalm
to Surah 3:96-97: "Indeed, the first sanctuary established for mankind was
the one at Bakka, a blessed place, a guidance to the peoples, in which are
plain memorials, the place where Abraham stood up to pray, and however enters
it is safe. The pilgrimage to the house is a duty for mankind to Allah, for him
who can find a way to get there. As for him who disbelieves, indeed, Allah is
independent of the worlds."
Shoemaker maintain that the parallels between
Psalm 84:6-7 and surah 3:96-97 are undeniable (p. 111): "If we are to take
seriously the Qur'an intertextuality with the Psalter, then we must acknowledge
this instance as a textbook example. It describes pilgrimage to a Holy House
dedicated to the God of Abraham, founded by Abraham, at a place called Baka,
which is an uncultivatable [surah 14:37] valley." Sure, a number of
Muslims identify the Meccan shrine as the Jerusalem temple, but Shoemaker
properly sees this apologetical move to read Psalm 84:6-7 as simply
"preposterous" to historians, let alone to historians of religion.
Robert Spencer, in "The Critical Qur'an
Explained from Key Islamic Commentaries and Contemporary Historical
Research," explains these two verses in part this way (italics removed),
p. 54: "Gibson observes that Bakka is 'an ancient Semitic word that means
to weep or lament. If a location was assigned the title 'Bacca' it would mean
the place of bacca. For example, the Valley of Bacca means the Valley of
Weeping or the Valley of Tears. This is usually because some calamity happened there
that caused people to weep. There are a number of Bacca or Baka valleys in the
Middle East today, each named because of some tragedy that occurred there in
the past. Luxenburg likewise evaluates the available evidence and concludes
that Bakka most likely means 'valley of tears.'. . . . It is more likely,
however, that the weeping would have to have been more generalized [than that
of tyants becoming humble in this area] for the entire place to be named for
it. In line with that, Gibson suggests that this is additional evidence that
the original holy city of Islam was not Mecca at all, and supports the theory
that the holy city was originally Petra, to which the earliest mosques point
(see [Spencer's comments on sura] 2:142). This is because, as Gibson points
out, if the first sanctuary was at Bakka, it was likely to have been a place
where a terrible tragedy had taken place, but there is no record of such an
event in Mecca in the centuries before Islam. In Petra, however, there were
major earthquakes in 363, 551, and 713, the last of which may have destroyed
the city altogether."
Alternatively, it's known that the original
qibla was towards Jerusalem. This is indirect evidence that "Bakka"
in surah 3:96-97 refers to the Temple Mount area and/or the Jerusalem temple
itself, which (of course) the Romans had destroyed in 70 A.D.
Eric Snow
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