Did Muhammad Exist?: An Inquiry into Islam's Obscure Origins (29 page)

42. “What thrusted you into Sakar?”

43. They shall say, “We were not of those who prayed,

44. and we fed not the needy,

45. and we plunged along with the plungers,

46. and we cried lies to the Day of Doom,

47. till the Certain came to us.”

48. Then the intercession of the intercessors shall not profit them.

49. What ails them, that they turn away from the Reminder,

50. as if they were startled asses

51. fleeing before a lion?

52. Nay, every man of them desires to be given scrolls unrolled.

53. No indeed; but they do not fear the Hereafter.

54. No indeed; surely it is a Reminder;

55. So whoever wills shall remember it.

56. And they will not remember, except that God wills; He is worthy to be feared, worthy to forgive.

Even in English, the lengthy, discursive verse 31 does not appear to be an original part of this passage. It looks immediately as if it has been added to the sura from another source—possibly some other sura of the Qur'an itself. It breaks the flow of the clipped, spare verses of the rest. The verse sounds more like the prosaic ruminations of what Islamic tradition considers to be the Qur'an's chronologically later passages than the vivid poetic visions of those traditionally held to be the chronologically early suras.

Lüling observes that Qur'an 74:1–30 “is composed in a very homogeneous form, in that every verse has the same rhythmic style and approximate length of, on average, three to four words (indicating its having originally been a strophic text).” Even Muslim scholars acknowledge that the sura was edited, he points out: “Islamic Koran scholarship has…classified this over-length-verse 74.31 as a late insertion into an earlier text.” According to those scholars, the editing took place during Muhammad's life, originating “in the Medinan period of the Prophet's activities as against his earlier Meccan period.”
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But the very fact that Islamic scholars admit that changes were made to the perfect book is significant.

The last line of the “homogeneous” section, verse 30, could be a fragment of what was originally a longer (and clearer) statement. Neither this verse nor any other states explicitly what there are “nineteen” of, or what these nineteen are exactly “over.” Apparently they are above “Sakar,” which is often translated as “the burning.” Accordingly, the Qur'an commentator Ibn Kathir explains that the nineteen are “the first of the guardians of Hell. They are magnificent in (their appearance) and harsh in their character.”
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While this interpretation is plausible, the cryptic nature of the verse has led many Islamic theologians and apologists to speculate about the mystical significance of the number nineteen.

To shed some light on this puzzling sura, Lüling looks closely at verses 11–17. In the traditional rendering, this passage is full of questionable material. Like Qur'an 96:9–19, it denounces an anonymous miscreant. Of whom is Allah, the sole creator and judge of all things, demanding that he be left alone to deal with? Again by examining the
rasm
and noting grammatical and other anomalies in the Arabic, Lüling smoothes out the difficulties and presents a reconstruction that makes more sense than the standard Qur'anic text. This reconstruction reveals the text as a Christological confession:

11. He has created me and the one He has created as a unique being.

12. And He has made him a property obedient to His will.

13. And He has testified to him by witnesses.

14. And He paved for him the way.

15. Then he desired that he might be increased.

16. Not at all that he was rebellious against His commandments.

17. So finally He has made him step through death up to the heights.
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Among other emendations, Lüling reads
dharni
, the contextually bizarre imperative in 74:11 to “leave me alone” or “dismiss me,” as
dharaani
, “He has created me.” And so, he argues, this passage
begins to become clear as a Christian confession of faith—but not one reflecting the theology of the Byzantine Empire or the Church of Constantinople. Rather, it is a rejection of Trinitarian Christology.

For centuries the Byzantine Empire had been convulsed by controversy over the nature of Christ. Once the emperor Constantine converted to Christianity and issued the Edict of Milan decriminalizing Christianity in 313, the rapidly growing new faith became important for the unity of the empire. Constantine sought to safeguard that unity by calling the first ecumenical council—that is, a meeting of all the bishops in the empire—to settle the question of the nature of Christ. This council met at Nicaea in 325.

At Nicaea the theology of Arius, a priest of the Church of Alexandria, was anathematized, and Arius himself was defrocked and excommunicated. Arius taught that Christ was not coeternal with God, as the victorious party taught, but was a created being, albeit an exalted one. After the council, Arians still wielded considerable influence within the empire; they came close on more than one occasion to becoming the dominant form of Christianity and reversing the decision of Nicaea. Their power waned, however, and eventually the political and social restrictions that the empire imposed on them became so onerous that they left its domains for points east: Syria and Arabia.
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The Arians were by no means the first or only Christian group to view Christ as created. The Jewish Christian Ebionites viewed Jesus as the Messiah but not in any sense divine. Their influence spread to Syria and the surrounding areas in the centuries immediately before the advent of Islam.
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The Pseudo-Clementine Homilies, three Christian writings falsely attributed to St. Clement of Rome that actually appear to be fourth-century Jewish Christian texts, declare that “our Lord neither asserted that there were gods except the Creator of all, nor did He proclaim Himself to be God, but He with reason pronounced blessed him who called Him the Son of that God who has arranged the universe.” They reject the idea that “he who comes from God is God.”
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Thus it is entirely possible that the Christian substratum of the Qur'an reflects a Christology that views Christ as a created being.
In Lüling's reconstruction of this passage, God created Jesus Christ as a unique being, “a property obedient to His will.” Jesus is not, in other words, the coeternal Son of God who existed for all eternity and became man. Lüling presents sura 74 as the product of a Christian group that rejected the high Christology of the great Church of Constantinople and maintained that Jesus was nothing more than a servant of God and His messenger. In his reconstruction, the entire sura 74 becomes a Christian hymn recounting Christ's descent into hell and affirming him as a created being.

As for the obviously interpolated verse 31, Lüling explains it as a later Islamic commentary on a pre-Islamic Christian text that was reworked and Islamized in verses 1–30.
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Whereas Qur'an commentators assert that verse 31 was added during the Medinan period of Muhammad's career, Lüling argues that “this traditional [Meccan / Medinan] division must be given up in favour of the contrast ‘pre-Islamic Christian strophic texts’ and ‘Islamic texts.’”
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According to Lüling, 74:31 is an Islamic commentary on the cryptic 74:30, “over it are nineteen.” The added verse is designed to affirm that the “nineteen” are the angels who are the guardians of hell, but there follows the odd warning that Allah has made this number “as a trial for the unbelievers; that those who were given the Book may have certainty, and that those who believe may increase in belief, and that those who were given the Book and those who believe may not be in doubt.” Lüling takes this strange warning as an indication that the Qur'an's explanation of “over it are nineteen” in 74:30 was controversial at the time it was written. He concludes that 74:31 is “not merely a sober commentary on that immediately preceding verse, but it is the emphatic reminder, most urgently put forward, to endorse the belief that these enigmatic words of verse 74.30 ‘on it are nineteen’ should actually mean ‘on it (the hellfire) are 19 (angels) appointed (as custodians).’ This urgent reminder is combined with threats against those who were unwilling to believe in this interpretation, obviously because they rejected this ‘simile’
(matal
as the text of verse 31 calls it itself) as inappropriate or even as wrong.”
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And they rejected it as wrong, and had to be threatened with becoming one of those whom Allah led astray, because “most probably they still knew the original meaning of this pre-Islamic Christian hymn in general, and therefore also the original meaning of verse 74.30 in particular, within its pre-Islamic Christian context. The Islamic interpretation, on which the inserted commentary verse 74.31 insists with intimidating warnings, represents indeed no biblical or other religious topos or well-known simile, so that from our point of view, based on the pre-Islamic hymnody so far uncovered in the Koran, this Islamic interpretation of 74.30 is nothing but the reinterpretation of an original Christian strophic text—which at that time of early Islam a lot of people still knew and tried to defend.”
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Hanifs
—Pagans or Monotheists?

The Qur'an's Christology, both in the canonical Islamic text and in the pre-Islamic Christian substratum that many scholars see in the book, is defiantly anti-Trinitarian. The Qur'an rejects the idea that Jesus is the Son of God and above all denounces those who take Christ to be part of the Godhead: “Say, ‘He is God, One, God the Everlasting Refuge, who has not begotten, and has not been begotten, and equal to Him is not any one’” (112:1–4). The phrase “equal to Him is not any one” may be a denial of the orthodox Christology holding the Son of God to be equal to the Father, and the assertion that God neither begets nor was begotten is clearly a response to the orthodox Christian designation of Christ as the “only begotten Son of God.”

Lüling sees traces of the Christian controversies over the nature of Christ in the Qur'an's denunciations of those who associate partners with Allah. To Lüling, the Muslim charge that the pagan Quraysh of Mecca were
mushrikun
, those who associated others with Allah in worship, indicates that the Quraysh had actually converted to Trinitarian Christianity. As the Islamic faith began to develop as a distinct religion, it decisively rejected this faith in Christ. Once
Islam's hard-line monotheism became more firmly established, the Qur'an needed to be reinterpreted to fit the new religion's developing theology.
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The Qur'an also speaks of
hanifs
, those who held to pre-Islamic monotheism. Qur'an 3:67 speaks of them gently, referring to the faith adhered to by the patriarch Abraham and the prophets. As Islamic tradition explains it, this verse makes clear that Abraham and his followers were not idol worshippers. But the term
hanif
is cognate with
hanpe
, or “pagan”—this is the word used for “pagan” in the Syriac rendering of the Bible, the Peshitta. The medieval Christian apologist al-Kindi (not to be confused with the Muslim Arab philosopher of the same name) writes that “Abraham used to worship the idol, i.e., the one named al-Uzza in Harran, as a
hanif
, as you agree, O you
hanif.
…He abandoned
al-hanifiyya
, which is the worship of idols, and became a monotheist Therefore we find
al-hanifiyya
in God's revealed scriptures as a name for the worship of idols.”
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Al-Kindi's reliability has been questioned, but the point here is not his assertions but his usage of the word
hanif
to refer to an idol worshipper rather than to a pre-Islamic monotheist.

It is odd that the Qur'an, according to Islamic tradition, uses the word
hanif
to refer to a pre-Islamic monotheist, whereas for the Peshitta and al-Kindi the term suggests a pagan. The discrepancy may suggest an intermediate step between pagan idolatry and the development of a full-blown Islam featuring Muhammad and his Qur'an: In this interim stage, some of the idolatrous
hanifs
may have embraced a vague monotheism that identified itself with, or considered itself akin to, Judaism and Christianity. Such
hanifs
would have endorsed a creedal statement such as Lüling's version of Qur'an 74:11–17, with its strong emphasis on Jesus Christ as a created being and messenger of God, not as God become man. As we have seen, the first decades of the Arab conquest show the conquerors holding not to Islam as we know it but to a vague creed with ties to some form of Christianity and Judaism. Perhaps this was the very embodiment of
al-hanifiyya
: arising out of Arab paganism, embracing monotheism, and then being overwhelmed by the development of the specific faith of Islam.

Christmas in the Qur'an

There is a great deal more in the Qur'an that suggests the presence of an originally Christian substratum. Luxenberg explains: “It is not just on the level of simple isolated words but also at the level of syntax that the Arab commentators have misunderstood the Koranic text, to the extent of misinterpreting entire suras. Thus the Arab exegetes saw in the title of Sura 108
(al-Kawthar)
, among other things, the name of a river in Paradise reserved exclusively for the Prophet or Muslims, and in the subsequent text the reprobation of an opponent of the Prophet who must have despised the latter for having been deprived of children. However the Syriac reading of this sura calls to mind the First Epistle of St Peter,
Chapter 5
verses 8–9, according to which—and in accordance with the introduction to the compline of the Roman service—the faithful are exhorted to persevere in their prayers by which their adversary, Satan, is routed.”
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