In Search of the Original Koran: The True History of the Revealed Text (17 page)

Tradition has generously given us details of these informants, starting with Tabari and many others." The Koran has not been able to defend itself against such attacks, since their pertinence was recognized, so that Tradition could not accuse them of lying, though it tried to sketch (without great conviction) an argument turning on the difference in language between the Prophet and the said informants. The only serious and "ritual" response was to recall the omnipotence and omniscience of the divine.

The question of "informants" of Muhammad has undoubtedly been confused with that of Christian scribes assigned to the redaction and composition of the text. Tradition has recognized their "fraudulent" participation in correcting the concluding formulas of the revealed texts. 12 In my opinion, this is only an adaptation of an original fact: the role, normally assumed in the elaboration of the Koranic text, by scribes, which was reduced by the new Muslim ideology to a minor role; in cases of "variants," the scribes or informants were suspected of falsification.

Gilliot has detected a remarkable common trait in this class of "informants": their exercise of metallurgical skills, designated by the technical term qayn. Coming from a Hebrew, Syriac, and Ethiopian root, this term refers to "the action of singing, launching into a funerary lamentation [gayn/gayna]."13 Gilliot suggests we should connect this skill with metal to a form of initiatory culture, like that practiced in Indo-European lands. In my opinion, things could be even simpler: the link between metalworking and singing owes much to the very technique of work with metal, which demands a certain "rhythm." The cadence of metalworking must have been accompanied by songs, in line with an ancient practice that survives even today; the exercise of certain skills is often enlivened by working songs. We find a remarkable example in the Arabic musical genre of the "mawwal," whose origin would have been a sung accompaniment to the rhythmic march of the camel in the desert.

It could have been the same for our blacksmiths associated with the singing genre of the qayn. That Muhammad's "informants" might have been blacksmiths, in these conditions, is a very interesting indication of their possible contribution, as scribes, to the elaboration of the Koranic style, from the work of its rhythm and of its conventional formulas, since these masters of metal were also normally masters of versification and of style.

What is important here for us is the argument raised against these informants-scribes concerning the veracity of the source of the inspiration, not the divine authenticity of the production of the Koranic text. We should not forget that the principal stake that dominated the period of prophetic revelation was to prove that the prophetic mission claimed by Muhammad was indeed authentic, and not to prove the literal authenticity of the divine message. It was not until well after the death of the Prophet that there was a change of perspective, at a time when it was no longer necessary to establish the authenticity of the prophetic apostolate. But given that prophecy broke down with the demise of Muhammad, the revealed text became the sole source of legitimacy and theological reference for Muslims, as it was for the secular powers at the time. And as this unique source of reference, the Koranic text henceforth acquired a new sacredness, the one enjoyed until then by the heavenly original, the preserved tablet. Therefore the religious dispute completely changed direction, and emergent Islam had to create from scratch a new dogma about the literal authenticity of the revealed text and to invent the myth of the annual correction of the revealed text by Muhammad with his inspiring archangel Gabriel.

t the end of this journey, I hope to have demonstrated the complexity of our questioning of the authenticity of the Koranic text. - - - -- - - - - - -

--- - What is important to know and to discover in this domain is not so much the alterations that affected the Koranic text in the course of its revelation or afterward, than the religious world as it was represented at the time of the revelation. This world had its own vision of the divine that is no longer our own. It also had its own way of seeing God, of communicating with humans, and its own representation of the prophets-all of which are hard to imagine in our own day.

The God of the Koran, Allah, would certainly not recognize himself in the idea that we have of him today, fourteen centuries after the Koranic revelation. In fact, God is far from being a disincarnate being, abstract and absolute, as he is represented today. Reading the Koran, he rather resembles the God of Abraham and of the Bible: a living God, who is of course wise, but who also has moments of anger, and has preferences, desires, and needs. He is a God in the image of Oriental monarchs: a God who surpasses all humans, of course, but a being with a human resemblance.

The same is true of his prophets, who have been so idealized in our day that they have been turned into divine beings. Even their companions have become the object of an almost divine cult; Muslim Tradition has compared them to "the stars of Heaven."

It is remarkable that the traditionalist biographies of Muhammad have effaced practically any testimony and all information on his life before he was forty years old, that is to say, before the start of his apostolate. In the Muslim consciousness, Muhammad was born an accomplished prophet, and from his birth, all he had to do was wait sagely for the hour of his mission. For example, Ibn Hazm (994-1064 CE) asserts that "we know with certainty that God has preserved His Prophets from adultery and from being the sons of adultery.... We know with certitude that Allah immunized them before their apostolate from anything they could be reproached for in the course of their apostolate, such as theft, aggression, harshness, pederasty, fornication, prejudices against people regarding their wives, their goods, or their persons." Then, Ibn Hazm reports a story attributed to Hassan, son of Ali ibn Abi Talib, in which the latter affirms having heard the Prophet say: "In my whole life I have never undertaken anything reprehensible, such as committed by pagans, except for twice, and each time God preserved me from it." And Muhammad recounts how, as a young shepherd, he wanted to have a good time during two soirees of a marriage celebrated in Mecca. But when he arrived at the party, God prevented him from doing what he wanted to do and put him to sleep until the break of day.' Here is one of the rare, properly biographical indications that we possess about the first forty years of the life of Muhammad! Moreover, Ibn Hazm reports that in his time it was claimed that "the ban on wine was not part of the sunna of the Prophet, and it was something that they [Muhammad and his companions] would have consumed. May God preserve them from such a thing!"'

It is this veritable ideological conditioning founded upon the sacralization of the person of the Prophet that lies at the origin of the Muslim perception of Koranic writing, glorified and made sublime in its turn by an irresistible movement. Thus an insurmountable barrier has been established against any historical and relativized perception of the Koran. Theological reason has triumphed over historical reason. Across the fourteen centuries that separate us from the time of revelation, history has been patiently and methodically rewritten. All the traces that might embarrass the new construction have been gradually eliminated. It is the writings themselves that have most taken the toll for this.

The work was so prompt and has been so thorough that today there remains practically no nonepigraphic writing that dates from the first century of Islam, including the Koran itself. The earliest testimony about the Koran during the first centuries has disappeared in turn forever. As we have just seen, there has also been a scorched-earth policy touching the biography of Muhammad, whether concerning his apostolate or his pagan life. Let us recall here that even the sayings of the Prophet were forbidden to circulate during the first century of Islam. The principal consequence of this tabula rasa of the past undertaken by political and religious powers has been to consecrate definitively the new orthodox ideology as the only possible and true one. Henceforth this becomes an ideology that no proof or serious clue can now touch, because any other trace has disappeared-or almost.

The trap has thus enclosed the consciousness of any Muslim. Ideology has taken definitively the upper hand over historical reality, such that it has become perfectly useless to produce any document, to advance any argument, to rediscover any truth about Islam as it actually existed and was lived by Muhammad. One is immediately accused of plotting against Islam, of wanting to do it harm, of deprecating it, and so on. Historical truth has become suspected of impiety, and the falsehood organized by those who hold religious power has proved to be a sure and effective guarantee of the piety of Muslims, who are thereby kept outside of, and in ignorance of, the true theological and historical debates.

The other victim of this ideologically orthodox system is incontestably-and paradoxically-the Koran. Not only were the first Koranic manuscripts destroyed on the caliphs' orders, but the Koran has been emptied of its content, and what has been substituted is a new Koran wholly fabricated from pieces called sunna, or a Tradition attributed after the fact to Muhammad. This Tradition is declared "to complete" the Koran, if not to abrogate it, and in any case furnishes us with "correct" explanations that one must adopt, in letter as well as in spirit. Any approach to the Koran necessarily must pass via the traditionalist dogma-otherwise, excommunication. The institution of the sunna is a veritable inquisitorial machine of formidable efficacy, so successful has it been in making Muslims believe that it holds a monopoly on truth about divine things, whereas its existence and its content are actually the work of a political system for cornering power. All the evidence shows that the pseudoexegesis of the Koran is just an impressive machine of apologetics that has functioned at the expense of the historical truth about the Koran. The very sacralization of the Koranic text, quite contrary to the Koranic spirit itself, has served as an excellent instrument for stifling definitively the voice of the Koran and its historicity. The historical critique of the Koranic text has by now suffered a lag of a century and a half in relation to the work that has exposed biblical texts to the light of human history.

The Muslim today is ignorant of everything about the Koran, as he is of anything about Muhammad, apart from the mythical cliches that take the place of history. The sacredness with which he surrounds the Koranic text prevents him almost physically from understanding it and discovering that it has meanings that are not those that orthodoxy authorizes, and that there is indeed a history the first Muslims arranged in their fashion that prevents us today from understanding that history-and from better understanding the Koran.