Did Muhammad Exist?: An Inquiry into Islam's Obscure Origins (24 page)

Perhaps such passages were placed in the book to explain the anomalies created by the rendering of considerable material that was not originally Arabic into Arabic.

Theodor Nöldeke, the great nineteenth-century scholar of Islam, explains what makes so much of the Qur'an incomprehensible:

On the whole, while many parts of the Qur'an undoubtedly have considerable rhetorical power, even over an unbelieving reader, the book, aesthetically considered, is by no means a first-rate performance…. Let us look at some of the more extended narratives. It has already been noticed how vehement and abrupt they are where they ought to be characterized by epic repose. Indispensable links, both in expression and in the sequence of events, are often omitted, so that to understand these histories is sometimes far easier for us than for those who learned them first, because we know most of them from better sources. Along with this, there is a great deal of superfluous verbiage; and
nowhere do we find a steady advance in the narration. Contrast, in these respects, “the most beautiful tale,” the history of Joseph (xii.), and its glaring improprieties, with the story in Genesis, so admirably executed in spite of some slight discrepancies. Similar faults are found in the non-narrative portions of the Qur'an. The connection of ideas is extremely loose, and even the syntax betrays great awkwardness. Anacolutha are of frequent occurrence, and cannot be explained as conscious literary devices. Many sentences begin with a “when” or “on the day when,” which seem to hover in the air, so that the commentators are driven to supply a “think of this” or some ellipsis. Again, there is no great literary skill evinced in the frequent and needless harping on the same words and phrases; in xviii., for example, “till that”
(hatta idha)
occurs no fewer than eight times. Muhammad, in short, is not in any sense a master of style.
²¹

Muhammad, or whatever committee that may have finalized the Qur'anic text in his name.

Whole phrases of this “pure and clear” book are unclear. In A. J. Arberry's elegant and often audaciously literal Qur'an (audacious in its reproduction in English of the Arabic original's grammatical infelicities and linguistic oddities), Qur'an 2:29 reads this way: “It is He who created for you all that is in the earth, then He lifted Himself to heaven and levelled them seven heavens; and He has knowledge of everything.” The contemporary Islamic scholar Ibn Warraq points out that “the plural pronoun ‘them’ in this verse has resisted all explanation.”
²²
Many translators smooth over the difficulty by reducing the “them” to an “it”; Pickthall, for example, renders this verse as “He it is Who created for you all that is in the earth. Then turned He to the heaven, and fashioned it as seven heavens. And He is knower of all things.” But in the Arabic, the first “heaven” is singular and yet the pronoun is unaccountably plural. To what, then, does the “them” refer? Any answer would be pure conjecture.

Nonce Words

There is more that makes the Qur'an incomprehensible. A number of words in the Qur'an simply don't make any sense: Not only are they not Arabic words, but they also have no meaning in any known language. Islamic scholars who have translated the Qur'an into other languages for the purposes of proselytizing and to aid non-Arabic-speaking Muslims have generally agreed on the meaning of these words; often, however, this agreement is simply a matter of convention, without any grounding in linguistic analysis. And sometimes there is no agreement at all. For example, the historian and Qur'anic scholar Muhammad ibn Jarir at-Tabari (839–923) details three different definitions, supported by twenty-seven witnesses through different chains of transmission, circulating among Islamic authorities for the word
kalala
in Qur'an 4:12. It is not clear, in a passage that is foundational for Islamic law regarding inheritance, whether this word refers to the person who has died or to his heirs—a crucial distinction.
²³

Some words have no clear referent. In Qur'an 2:62 and 5:69, salvation is promised to those who believe in the Qur'an, as well as to Jews, Christians, and Sabians. Muslim exegetes identify the Sabians as the followers of the Israelite King David. The word
Sabians
means “Baptizers.”
²⁴
The Qur'an identifies David as a prophet, and Allah gives him the book of Psalms (4:163). The Sabians are thus supposed to be followers of David and readers of the Psalms for whom baptism was a central ritual. But the only Sabians of whom something is known historically, the Sabians of Harran, did not practice baptism or notably revere the Psalms. There is no record independent of Islamic literature of any group of Sabians that actually did do those things. Thus the actual recipient of the Qur'anic promise of salvation remains unclear.
²⁵

The Qur'an also coins such terms as
Sijjin
, which appears in 83:7–9: “Nay, the Book of the libertines is in Sijjin; and what shall teach thee what is Sijjin? A book inscribed.”
Sijjin
is not an Arabic word; nor is it
a recognizable word from any other language. Even this brief Qur'an passage is bewildering, as Sijjin is first identified as the place where the “Book of the libertines”—apparently the record of the evil deeds of the damned—is stored (it is “in Sijjin”) and then, almost immediately afterward, as that record itself (Sijjin is “a book inscribed”).
²⁶
Perhaps Sijjin is a larger written record of which the “Book of the libertines” is only a part—but that is just the sort of intellectual contortions that the Qur'an forces the attentive reader into.

A similar word is
sijill
in Qur'an 21:104: “On the day when We shall roll up heaven as a
sijill.”
Arberry translates
sijill as
a “scroll…rolled for the writings.” Pickthall translates the word as “a written scroll,” and that is the accepted understanding today—perhaps owing to its similarity to
Sijjin
, which the Qur'an identifies as “a book inscribed.” But
sijill
could also be a proper name, or something else altogether.
²⁷
Arthur Jeffery, author of the important book
The Foreign Vocabulary of the Qur'an
, notes that the meaning of
sijill
was “unknown to the early interpreters of the Qur'an.” He adds, “Some took it to be the name of an Angel, or of the Prophet's amanuensis.”
²⁸
The fourteenth-century Islamic scholar Ibn Kathir reflects the confusion in his commentary on the passage:

What is meant by
Sijill
is book. As-Suddi said concerning this Ayah:
“As-Sijill
is an angel who is entrusted with the records; when a person dies, his Book (of deeds) is taken up to
As-Sijill
, and he rolls it up and puts it away until the Day of Resurrection.” But the correct view as narrated from Ibn Abbas is that
as-Sijill
refers to the record (of deeds). This was also reported from him by Ali bin Abi Talhah and Al-Awfi. This was also stated by Mujahid, Qatadah and others. This was the view favored by Ibn Jarir, because this usage is well-known in the (Arabic) language.
²⁹

The parenthetical “Arabic” was added by the English translator. According to Jeffery, however,
sijill
is not an Arabic word at all. The
term is derived from Greek
sigillon
, meaning an “imperial edict.” Jeffery notes that the first Arabic use appears to be in this very passage of the Qur'an.
³⁰

Equally puzzling is the term
Allahu as-samad
, which is found in Qur'an 112:2. Mainstream twentieth-century Muslim translators of the Qur'an render this term alternately as “God, the Everlasting Refuge” (Arberry), “Allah, the Eternal, Absolute” (Abdullah Yusuf Ali), and “Allah, the eternally Besought of all!” (Pickthall). But no one is sure what
as-samad
really means; it is another Qur'anic nonce word that has puzzled scholars through the ages. It is commonly translated as “eternal,” but that is a matter of convention more than of any actual discernment of its meaning. Tabari offers a variety of meanings for the word, including “the one who is not hollow, who does not eat and drink,” and “the one from whom nothing comes out,” the latter being a familiar Qur'anic designation of Allah as the one who does not beget and is not begotten.
³¹
After examining the available evidence, the Yale philologist and historian Franz Rosenthal concludes that
as-samad
may be “an ancient Northwest Semitic religious term, which may no longer have been properly understood by Muhammad himself”
³²
—or by whoever actually compiled the Qur'an.

Another mysterious Qur'anic word is
al-kawthar
, the title of sura 108. The first verse of that sura is “Lo! We have given thee
al-kawthar
”; the word, unknown outside of this phrase, is commonly rendered as “abundance,” “bounty,” or “plenty.” But this, too, is a matter of convention. The popular Qur'an commentary known as the
Tafsir al-Jalalayn
explains that
“Kawthar
is a river in the Garden from which the Basin of his Community is watered.
Kawthar
means immense good, in the form of Prophethood, Qur'an, intercession and other things.”
³³
Other Muslim scholars, however, are not so sure. The Qur'anic scholar al-Qurtubi (d. 1273) offers seventeen different interpretations of
al-kawthar;
al-Qurtubi's contemporary Ibn an-Naqib (d. 1298) offers twenty-six.
³⁴
The multiplicity of explanations testifies to the fact that no one really knew what the word meant at all; everyone was simply hazarding his best guess.

There is also an abundance of non-Arabic words in this most self-consciously Arabic book. Many Islamic exegetes have understood that the Qur'an contains no non-Arabic words at all, since the Qur'an is in “Arabic, pure and clear” (16:103), and Allah has explained that he would not have “sent this as a Qur'an in a language other than Arabic” (41:44).
³⁵
The renowned Islamic jurist ash-Shafii, for instance, argues that “the Book of God is in the Arabic language without being mixed with any (foreign words).”
³⁶

Yet this position is impossible to sustain. As both Muslim and non-Muslim scholars have noted, the Qur'an is full of non-Arabic loanwords.

A Syriac Religious Universe

Since the Qur'an frequently retells biblical stories and refers to biblical prophets, one might expect the Qur'anic names for those prophets to be informed by Hebrew usage. But the Jews in the Near East no longer spoke Hebrew. Rather, they spoke Aramaic, Greek, and other languages. And the names in the Qur'an consistently show signs of having been derived from Syriac, the dialect of Aramaic that was the primary literary language in Arabia and the surrounding regions when Muhammad is supposed to have lived.

Syriac, also known as Syro-Aramaic, “is the branch of Aramaic in the Near East originally spoken in Edessa and the surrounding area in Northwest Mesopotamia and predominant as a written language from Christianization to the origin of the Koran,” explains the modern scholar Christoph Luxenberg. “For more than a millennium Aramaic was the lingua franca in the entire Middle Eastern region before being gradually displaced by Arabic beginning in the 7th century.”
³⁷

Alphonse Mingana (1878–1937), the pioneering Assyrian historian of early Islam, explains that “the proper names of biblical personages found in the Qur'an are used in their Syriac form. Such names include those of Solomon, Pharaoh, Isaac, Ishmael, Jacob,
Noah, Zachariah and Mary.”
³⁸
In fact, “there is not a single biblical name with an exclusively Hebrew pronunciation in the whole of the Qur'an,” and “the Jewish influence on the religious vocabulary of the Qur'an is indeed negligible.”
³⁹

Nor is the Syriac influence restricted to names. “Almost all the religious terms in the Qur'an,” Mingana notes, “are derived from Syriac.”
⁴⁰
These include words that have come to be closely identified with Islam itself, including
Allah
;
ayah
(“sign,” in the sense of a divine manifestation, or verse of the Qur'an);
kafir
(“unbeliever”);
salat
(“prayer”);
nafs
(“soul”);
jannah
(“Paradise”);
taghut
(“infidelity”); and
masih
(“Christ”).
⁴¹
The Qur'anic word for Christians is
nasara;
according to Mingana, “there is no other language besides Syriac in which the word ‘Christians’ is expressed by the word
nasara
or anything near it.…There is no doubt whatever that in the Persian Empire, and to some extent also in the Roman Empire, the Christians were called by non-Christians
nasraye
(the
Nasara
of the Qur'an), and that the Prophet took the word from the Syrians.”
⁴²

Other Qur'anic words were common in Syriac but rare in Arabic before the composition of the Qur'an. These include
rahman
(“compassionate”), which forms part of the Qur'anic invocation
bismilla ar-rahman ar-rahim
(“In the name of Allah, the compassionate, the merciful”).

Even the word
Qur'an
itself may come from the Syriac, in which language it refers to a liturgical reading from scripture, a lectionary.
⁴³