Did Muhammad Exist?: An Inquiry into Islam's Obscure Origins (25 page)

The Qur'an also features traces of Syriac sentence constructions. Mingana notes that Qur'an 2:79, which is generally translated as “Then are you the very persons who kill yourselves,” is “very peculiar” in the Arabic: “The use of demonstrative pronouns without the relative pronouns, when followed by a verb the action of which they tend to corroborate, is Syriac and not Arabic.” Among many other such examples, he cites Qur'an 62:11, usually given as “And if any of your wives escape from you to the unbelievers.” But in Arabic, Mingana says, the word interpreted as “wives,”
shai
, is not “applied to a human being”; this usage “betrays the Syriac
middaim
, which is
applied to reasonable beings.” Because of the “insurmountable difficulty” this usage poses, Muslim scholars have resorted to “worthless compromises.”
⁴⁴

The Syriac influence is not restricted simply to word usage and sentence construction. The Qur'an in sura 18 (verses 83–101) tells the curious story of Dhul-Qarnayn, “the one with two horns,” who traveled to “the setting-place of the sun,” where “he found it setting in a muddy spring” (18:84–86), and then journeyed on “till, when he reached the rising-place of the sun, he found it rising on a people for whom We had appointed no shelter therefrom” (18:90).
⁴⁵
Who was this mysterious traveler? Islamic tradition has identified him frequently, albeit not unanimously, as Alexander the Great. The Alexander legend circulated in many languages, but none had any presence in Arabia at the time of Muhammad except the Syriac. As a result, after eliminating other possibilities, Mingana declares that “we have only the Syrians left from whom the Prophet, or the editor of the Qur'an, could have derived his information.”
⁴⁶

It is not outside the realm of possibility, of course, that these Syriac words were circulating in seventh-century Arabia. But in view of the Qur'an's self-conscious insistence that it is an Arabic book, they provide additional evidence that the Qur'an originated in circumstances quite different from the standard Islamic picture of a lone prophet huddled in a cave on Mount Hira, where he encountered the angel Gabriel.

Not Just the Religious Vocabulary But the Cultural Vocabulary Also

And there is more evidence. Arthur Jeffery wrote in 1938 that “not only the greater part of the religious vocabulary, but also most of the cultural vocabulary of the Quran is of non-Arabic origin.”
⁴⁷

That is a staggering claim to make about a book that presents itself as having been delivered by an Arabian prophet for Arabic speakers.
Yet Jeffery notes an anomaly: Despite the fact that the Qur'an is supposed to have originated in Arabia, it breathes very little of the air of that time and place: “From the fact that Muhammad was an Arab, brought up in the midst of Arabian paganism and practising its rites himself until well on into manhood, one would naturally have expected to find that Islam had its roots deep down in this old Arabian paganism. It comes, therefore, as no little surprise, to find how little of the religious life of this Arabian paganism is reflected in the pages of the Qur'an.”
⁴⁸

One explanation for this odd absence may be that the Qur'an didn't originate in the milieu of Arabian paganism, or in Arabia at all.

To examine the “cultural vocabulary” of the Qur'an, consider one of the most notable non-Arabic words in the book:
jizya.
This word appears in the Qur'an only once, but it became extremely significant in the Muslim world. Qur'an 9:29 says: “Fight those who believe not in Allah nor the Last Day, nor hold that forbidden which hath been forbidden by Allah and His Messenger, nor acknowledge the religion of Truth, (even if they are) of the People of the Book, until they pay the Jizya with willing submission, and feel themselves subdued.”
⁴⁹

The jizya was a poll tax the Islamic state levied on the
dhimmis
, or the People of the Book (primarily Jews and Christians), as a symbol of their submission and subservience. In Islamic law this payment was (and is) the cornerstone of the humiliating and discriminatory regulations meant to deprive those who rejected Muhammad's prophetic claim. “The subject peoples,” according to a classic manual of Islamic law, must “pay the non-Muslim poll tax (jizya)”—but that is by no means all. They “are distinguished from Muslims in dress, wearing a wide cloth belt (zunnar); are not greeted with ‘as-Salamu ‘alaykum’ [the traditional Muslim greeting, “Peace be with you”]; must keep to the side of the street; may not build higher than or as high as the Muslims’ buildings, though if they acquire a tall house, it is not razed; are forbidden to openly display wine or pork…recite the Torah or Evangel aloud, or make public display of their funerals
or feastdays; and are forbidden to build new churches.”
⁵⁰
If they violated these terms, they could lawfully be killed or sold into slavery.

But there are problems with the Qur'anic passage from which such Islamic laws supposedly derive. The People of the Book, in the translation of Qur'an 9:29 by Abdullah Yusuf Ali, must be made to pay “the Jizya with willing submission, and feel themselves subdued”
(al-jizyata ‘an yadin wa-humma saghirun).
Although
saghirun
clearly means “subdued,” or “humbled” or “lowly,” the words
al-jizya
and
‘an yadin
do not appear anywhere else in the Qur'an, and their meaning is not entirely clear. Of
jizya
, Jeffery notes a Syriac word from which the Arabic one may be derived. He says that the word “looks very much like an interpolation in the Qur'an reflecting later usage. In later Islam,
jizya
was the technical term for the poll-tax imposed on the Dhimmis, i.e., members of protected communities.”
⁵¹
‘An yadin
, meanwhile, can be understood in different ways. Ali renders it as “with willing submission,” but it could also mean “out of hand,” in the sense not only of submission but also of direct, in-person payment. The thirteenth-century Qur'anic commentator al-Baydawi explains: “Out of hand, indicating the condition of those who pay the tribute. Out of a hand that gives willingly, in this way indicating that they submit obediently; or out of their hand, meaning that they pay the tribute with their own hands, instead of sending it through others; no one is allowed to use a proxy in this case.”
⁵²
There are many other possible understandings of this text. The great scholar Franz Rosenthal observes that
‘an yadin
has “completely defied interpretation. All post-Qur'anic occurrences of it are based upon the Qur'an.”
⁵³

What's more, although the Islamic law regarding the
dhimmis
was elaborated from supposed commands of the Muslim prophet, the regulations centered on the
jizya
were not codified in so specific a form until several centuries after Muhammad's time.
⁵⁴
So the term
jizya
could have been elaborated in later Islam—when the great corpus of Islamic law was being formulated and codified—but read back into a much earlier setting and incorporated into the Qur'an. And the strong evidence of Syriac linguistic influence suggests that when
it was elaborated, it could have been done in a Syriac environment, farther north than the Arabian setting the Qur'an so self-consciously insists on.

A Text Converted to Arabic

It may be, then, that the Qur'an's foreign derivation is one of the primary reasons the book takes pains to establish itself as an Arabic text. One reason for the Qur'an's Arabic protestations, other than the charges that Muhammad was listening to a nonnative speaker of Arabic, may be that the Qur'an was not originally written in Arabic at all but was eventually rendered in Arabic as the new religion was being developed. Because the empire that it was designed to buttress was an Arabic one, it was essential that the new holy book be in Arabic. The political imperative was to provide the new and growing empire with a religious culture distinct from that of the Byzantines and Persians—one that would provide for the loyalty, cohesiveness, and unity of the newly conquered domains.

To provide the new religion with its own holy book, its developers turned to existing sources.

A Clue

W
hat, then, was the Qur'an in its original form? One clue comes from Qur'an 25:1: “Blessed is He Who has revealed unto His slave the Criterion (of right and wrong), that he may be a warner to the peoples.”
¹
The word that Muhammad Marmaduke Pickthall here translates as “the Criterion (of right and wrong)” is
al-furqan
, which is also the name of the sura as a whole. Islamic tradition generally identifies the Criterion,
al-furqan
, as the Qur'an, and Muhammad as the “warner to the peoples.” The mainstream Qur'an commentary known as the
Tafsir al-Jalalayn
says that the Qur'an is “called thus
[al-furqan]
because it has discriminated
(faraqa)
between truth and falsehood.”
²
If the
furqan
is that which discriminates between truth and falsehood, then it is the criterion by which one distinguishes one from the other.
³

In Syriac,
furqan
means “redemption” or “salvation.” And warner,
nadhir
, is a word that is constructed from three consonants—n,
dh
, and
r
—that in Hebrew, Aramaic, and Syriac all have the principal meaning of “to vow.” The particular form
nadhir
is a verbal adjective meaning “vowed,” “votive gift,” or “sacrifice.”

Accordingly, a more precise, albeit less traditionally Islamic, translation of Qur'an 25:1 would be “Blessed is He who sent down the redemption on His servant that he might be a sacrifice for the peoples.”

This is a Christian statement: It is Jesus Christ who was sent down (John 1:1, 1:14) to be a sacrifice (Ephesians 5:1; Hebrews 10:10–14) for the redemption (Ephesians 1:7) of all people (I John 2:2).
⁴

Of course, it may appear preposterous on its face that the Qur'an, which contains so much polemical material attacking orthodox Christianity, would make a Christian statement. But as we have seen, the early historical records contain elements that seem equally odd when compared with the canonical account of Islam's origins. These records, including official Arab inscriptions and coins bearing crosses, show that the Arab conquerors, though generally hostile to the concepts of the divinity and redemption of Christ, had a much freer attitude toward Christian symbols than mature Islam would later display. The Arab attitude toward Christianity and Judaism in this era appears to have been far more fluid and in many ways more welcoming than it would ultimately become in Islam.

Moreover, on close examination, the Qur'an itself betrays evidence of having been adapted from a Christian text.

Ambiguous Text

To move toward a fuller answer to the question of what the Qur'an may have been originally, one must know a bit about how the Arabic alphabet works. Like Hebrew, Arabic does not have letters for short vowels (it does for long ones). Nor does it have letters for certain consonants. Many Arabic letters are identical to one another in appearance except for their diacritical marks—that is, the dots that appear above or below the character. In fact, twenty-two of the twenty-eight letters in the Arabic alphabet in some or all forms depend on diacritical marks to distinguish them from at least one other letter.

The Arabic letter
ra
(
), for example, is identical to the letter
zay
(
), except that the
zay
carries a dot above it. The letter
sin
(
) looks exactly the same as
shin
(
), except that the latter features three dots above the character. One symbol could be three different letters:
ba
(
) with a dot under it,
ta
(
) with two dots above it, and
tha
(
) with three dots above it;
nun
(
) is also quite similar in form. Obviously, these similarities can make for enormous differences in meaning.