In Search of the Original Koran: The True History of the Revealed Text (11 page)

The surahs contained in the actual book of the Koran are all preceded, except for surah 9 ("Repentance"), by the liturgical formula, bismi allahi al-rahmani al-rahimi, which might be translated as "In the name of Allah, the Merciful Benefactor" (Blachere), or as "In the name of God lenient and merciful" (Paret). It is evident, after what I have just said on the subject of the gradual formation of surahs, that this formula could not have been considered as being part of the surahs until after their composition.

This might be proved by other considerations. First of all, as Welch demonstrated, the first Koranic revelations referred to God as rabb (Lord). It was only in the second period that the names "Allah" and "al-Rahman" appeared (with even a preference for the latter, for example, in surah 19, where "al-Rahman" is cited sixteen times). Verse 17:110 authorizes Muslims to use the two names of God: "Say: call on Allah or call on al-Rahman! By whatever name you call on Him, His are the most gracious names." This verse might be explained by the debate (related in Tradition) on the subject of the rejection by certain Qurayshite companions of the use of the name al-Rahman, who preferred the name Allah. No doubt it was after these incidents that al-Rahman became less and less used as a name for God in the revealed texts.28

Let us note here that the name "Rahman" is the name of a south Arabian divinity. It was assimilated in the west Semitic domain to Hadad, the god of thunder. Musaylima, who pretended to prophesize in the time of Muhammad, was directly inspired by this same god alRahman. The debate over the name of God might have had a direct or indirect relation with the dissidence of Musaylima, who was executed by the prestigious military leader Khalid ibn al-Walid during a military expedition ordered by the first caliph of Islam, Abu Bakr, after the death of the Prophet. In addition, we find the story of Musaylima curiously mentioned in the context of the collecting of the Koran, since certain accounts explain that the decision to undertake it was taken as a result of the death of a great number of readers of the Koran in the course of the battle waged against this "false" prophet. This battle might perhaps have been the culmination of a disagreement that went back to the debate over the god al-Rahman and that would have needed sanction from the new powers to refine an official text that might ratify this victory and prevent the revelations of Musaylima being considered as canonical. This danger was all the more real because Muhammad had adopted an attitude, as we have seen, of reconciliation with al-Rahman.

And so there might have been a certain relation between the elimination of Musaylima and the commencement of the formation of a Koranic canon. Al-Kindi, a Christian Arabic author of the eighth and ninth centuries of the Common Era, replies to a Muslim opponent on the subject of the inimitability of the Koran that he had held in his hands a compilation of the revelations of Musaylima: "You cannot dis regard that men such as Musaylima al-HanafI, al-Aswad al-`Anasi, Tulayha al-Asadi, and so many others, produced works similar to that of your master. I attest, for my part, that I have read a collection by Musaylima that, had it appeared, might have brought several of your friends to renounce Islam. But these men had no support, as was the case for your master."29

Quite evidently, we do not know if the basmala was present in Musaylima's compilation, but Muslim Tradition was reluctant to count the basmala as a verse, even if the current vulgate considers it such. According to Tradition, some compilations of the Koran assimilated this formula into a verse, thus increasing the total number of Koranic verses by 114. In his Kitab al-kashf, al-Qaysi, who relayed this fact, rejected this practice as not conforming to the consensus among the companions of the Prophet or to the view of their immediate successors .3' In fact, two important legal schools defended opposing doctrines: the legal advisers of Medina, Basra, and Syria refused to grant the basmala a verse status, reducing it to a simple editorial technique serving in the Koranic codices to separate the surahs, or at most as a formula of benediction. By contrast, the Shafi' ite legal advisers of Mecca and Kufa considered the basmala as a verse in and of itself, and they recited it aloud.31

But a very interesting indication exists about the place of the basmala in the origins of Islam. In effect, Tradition concerning the reading of the Koran informs us that Muhammad did not recite the basmala when he read the surahs one after another.32 For his part, Hamza, who was one of the seven canonical readers, is said not to have pronounced the basmala formula between surahs. Al-Qaysi, who reported this, gives this explanation for it: "The basmala was not for him-nor in the opinion of the jurists-considered a verse, he omitted it during the passage from one surah to the other, in order that one would not suppose that it constituted a verse situated at the start of the surah. For him, the Koran was, in its totality, taken as a single surah.... Its presence in the collected Koran was only a means to indicate that one surah was terminated and that another was beginning."33

These indications, one sees, are very instructive about the liturgical function of the basmalas when they were first used. It was only relatively late, during the "collection" phase of the Koranic text, that a basmala ended up being attached to each of the surahs. This evolution is thus similar to the fate of the mysterious letters that figured at the head of the first collections, which, reproduced and recombined during the splitting up of these first collections, had thereby lost their initial function. In both cases, there is a tendency to fix and integrate into the revealed text some elements that at the start were not part of it and had quite different uses.

We would say just the same thing about the titles of surahs, which were perfectly integrated into the copies of the Koran from the beginnings of Islam down to the present day. Nevertheless, these titles do not figure in the first known Koranic manuscripts. Their absence results from the very history of the constitution of the revelations in surahs, a hazardous history that, as we have seen, resulted only very late in the current concept of the surah. Moreover, the signature-letters were meant to fulfill the function of title until a very late date. But we have seen that this system pertained only to the first phase of the collection of revelations into anthologies. The fractioning of the latter meant that several surahs bore the same letters, without anyone trying to differentiate them. Nevertheless, it seems that there were some attempts in this direction, as in the passage from A.L.M. to A.L.M.S., or to A.L.M.R. But this phenomenon remained rare. Letters could no longer fulfill the function of title-hence the recourse to other designations, which were elaborated in a very improvised way, since numerous surahs had several denominations from the start, as illustrated by Suyuti in his chapter on the "Names of Surahs."34 A title is often a key word that marks the surah, either because it is found there exclusively, or because it evokes a particular theme. Sometimes one even utilizes the mysterious letters of the surah to designate it, which is normally only a return to the sources.

Tradition, according to Suyuti, tried to make the titles of surahs date back to the Prophet, who is said to have fixed them.35 Yet the same Suyuti reports in the following paragraph that a tradition has Anas ibn Malik, celebrated companion of the Prophet, say: "Never say `Surah of the Cow', nor `Surah the Family of Imran', nor `Surah of the Women' etc., but say: `the surah where the Cow is mentioned', or `the surah where the Imran family is described,' etc." And Suyuti hastens to remark that this tradition is not certain.36 This testimony confirms that the adoption of the actual titles of surahs did not prevail until after many hesitations, and that these titles were not integrated into the corpus of revelation until quite late-later, even, than the mysterious letters.

Recent codicological research has demonstrated an evolution in the formula of presentation of the titles of surahs within the mass of fragments of manuscripts from Sanaa, Yemen, discovered recently (1972). Bothmer, who has studied these manuscripts, observes that the first scribes (at the end of the first century of the Hijra) utilized this formula at the end of the surah: "End of Ara X," after the model of the first Christian manuscripts of the Bible.37 Then the formula became "End of sura X and start of Ara Y (khdtimatu surat X wa fnti- hatu surat Y)." Later, the formula was reduced to its initial part"Start of sura X"-and then it became stable with simply "sura X." Thus, the indicative formula of surahs changed places, migrating from the end of the surah to its beginning. Of course, all this evolution was merely the final phase of a previous evolution that saw the gradual formation of the titles of surahs.

his fixing of the redactional elements of the Koran was performed gradually and in several stages. Still, the collection of the Koran remains a complex phenomenon surrounded in deep obscurity. This phenomenon is due not only to the extreme indigence of our paleographic documentation, but also to the very nature of the revelation and its relation to the text.

We have seen how the preambles and letter-signs that accompany them were imposed on the Koranic text on account of external needs, purely editorial and scriptural, that conformed to the practices of the time.

The same is true of the very project to collect the Koran, which was accepted tacitly as an imperative, inscribed within the logic of a scriptural revelation, whereas the project of "a book" came about only a posteriori, once the revelation was complete.

Even the very idea of gathering the scattered texts of the revelation into a collection, according to stories reported by tradition, had been received with amazement: "How, exclaimed Caliph Abu Bakr, would I dare to do something that the Prophet did not do?"' This was how he responded to Umar, who had suggested this project, as we have just seen, after the death of a great number of reciters of the Koran during the battle of Yamama, in which the Muslims fought Musaylima, the false prophet. Abu Bakr, who ended up accepting this project, designated Zayd ibn Thabit, one of the Prophet's secretaries, to carry out this audacious enterprise. But the latter was in turn scandalized and is said to have made the same response as Abu Bakr had given to Umar. But Zayd, too, ended up accepting the task.