Who is the koran written by

Earlier scholars such as Torrey, recognizing the genuine borrowings in the Koran from Rabbinic literature, had jumped to conclusions about the Jewish population in the Hijaz i. But as Wansbrough puts it, "References in Rabbinic literature to Arabia are of remarkably little worth for purposes of historical reconstruction, and especially for the Hijaz in the sixth and seventh centuries.

Much influenced by the Rabbinic accounts, the early Muslim community took Moses as an exemplum, and then a portrait of Muhammad emerged, but only gradually and in response to the needs of a religious community.

Another gradual development was the emergence of the idea of the Arabian origins of Islam. To this end, there was elaborated the concept of a sacred language, Arabic. The Koran was said to be handed down by God in pure Arabic.

It is significant that the ninth century also saw the first collections of the ancient poetry of the Arabs: "The manner in which this material was manipulated by its collectors to support almost any argument appears never to have been very successfully concealed. Second, it gave a specifically Arabian flavor, an Arabian setting to their religion, something distinct from Judaism and Christianity.

Exegetical traditions were equally fictitious and had but one aim, to demonstrate the Hijazi origins of Islam. Wansbrough gives some negative evidence to show that the Koran had not achieved any definitive form before the ninth century:. It may be added that those few exceptions are themselves hardly evidence for the existence of the canon, and further observed that even where doctrine was alleged to draw upon scripture, such is nor necessarily proof of the earlier existence of the scriptural source.

Derivation of law from scripture A similar kind of negative evidence is absence of any reference to the Quran in the Fiqh Akbar I….

The latter is a document, dated to the middle of the eighth century, which was a kind of statement of the Muslim creed in face of sects. Thus the Fiqh Akbar I represents the views of the orthodoxy on the then prominent dogmatic questions. It seems unthinkable had the Koran existed that no reference would have been made to it.

Wansbrough submits the Koran to a highly technical analysis with the aim of showing that it cannot have been deliberately edited by a few men, but "rather the product of an organic development from originally independent traditions during a long period of transmission. The very notion of biographical data in the Quran depends on exegetical principles derived from material external to the canon. A group of scholars influenced by Wansbrough took an even more radical approach; they rejected wholesale the entire Islamic version of early Islamic history.

In this interpretation, Islam emerged as an autonomous religion and culture only within the process of a long struggle for identity among the disparate peoples yoked together by the Conquests: Jacobite Syrians, Nestorian Aramaeans in Iraq, Copts, Jews, and finally peninsular Arabs.

The traditional account of the life of Muhammad and the rise of Islam is no longer accepted by Cook, Crone, and Hinds. In the shore but pithy monograph on Muhammad in the Oxford Past Masters series, Cook gives his reasons for rejecting the biographical traditions:.

False ascription was rife among the eighth-century scholars, and Neither of these propositions is as arbitrary as it sounds. We have reason to believe that numerous traditions on questions of dogma and law were provided with spuriousus chains of authorities by those who put them into circulation; and at the same time we have much evidence of controversy in the eighth century as to whether it was permissible to reduce oral tradition to writing.

The implications of this view for the reliability of our sources are clearly rather negative. If we cannot trust the chains of authorities, we can no longer claim to know that we have before us the separately transmitted accounts of independent witnesses; and if knowledge of the life of Muhammad was transmitted orally for a century before it was reduced to writing, then the chances are that the material will have undergone considerable alteration in the process.

Cook then looks at the non-Muslim sources: Greek, Syriac, and Armenian. Here a totally unexpected picture emerges. Further, it emerges from this evidence that the Muslims prayed in a direction much further north than Mecca, hence their sanctuary cannot have been in Mecca.

These are trivial from the point of view of content, but the fact that they appear in such formal contexts as these goes badly with the notion that the text had already been frozen. The earliest Greek source speaks of Muhammad being alive in , two years after his death according to Muslim tradition.

The Armenian chronicler of the s describes Muhammad as establishing a community which comprised both Ishmaelites i. The oldest Greek source makes the sensational statement that the prophet who had appeared among the Saracens i. We cannot easily dismiss the evidence as the product of Christian prejudice, since it finds confirmation in the Hebrew apocalypse [an eighth-century document, in which is embedded an earlier apocalypse that seems to be contemporary with the conquests].

The break with the Jews is then placed by the Armenian chronicler immediately after the Arab conquest of Jerusalem.

Although Palestine does play some sort of role in Muslim traditions, it is already demoted in favor of Mecca in the second year of the Hegira, when Muhammad changed the direction of prayer for Muslims from Jerusalem to Mecca. Thereafter it is Mecca which holds center stage for his activities. But in the non-Muslim sources, it is Palestine which is the focus of his movement, and provides the religious motive for its conquest.

The Armenian chronicler further gives a rationale for this attachment: Muhammad told the Arabs that, as descendants of Abraham through Ishmael, they too had a claim to the land which God had promised to Abraham and his seed. If the external sources are in any significant degree right on such points, it would follow that tradition is seriously misleading on important aspects of the life of Muhammad, and that even the integrity of the Koran as his message is in some doubt.

In view of what was said above about the nature of the Muslim sources, such a conclusion would seem to me legitimate; but is fair to add that it is not usually drawn. Cook points out the similarity of certain Muslim beliefs and practices to those of the Samaritans discussed below. He also points out that the fundamental idea developed by Muhammad of the religion of Abraham was already present in the Jewish apocryphal work called the Book of Jubilees dated to c.

C; , and which may well have influenced the formation of Islamic ideas. Sozomenus goes on to describe certain Arab tribes who, on learning of their Ishmaelite origins from Jews, adopted Jewish observances.

Again there may have been some influence on the Muslim community from this source. Cook also points out the similarity of the story of Moses exodus, etc. In Jewish messianism, "the career of the messiah was seen as a re-enactment of that of Moses; a key event in the drama was an exodus, or flight, from oppression into the desert, whence the messiah was to lead a holy war to reconquer Palestine.

Given the early evidence connecting Muhammad with Jews and Jewish messianism at the time when the conquest of Palestine was initiated, it is natural to see in Jewish apocalyptic thought a point of departure for his political ideas. Cook and Patricia Crone had developed these ideas in their intellectually exhilarating work Hagarism: The Making of the Islamic World Unfortunately, they adopted the rather difficult style of their "master" Wansbrough, which may well put off all but the most dedicated readers; as Humphreys says, "their argument is conveyed through a dizzying and unrelenting array of allusions, metaphors, and analogies.

It seems probable that the early Arab community, while it was developing its own religious identity, did not call itself "Muslim. The Mahgraye are the descendants of Abraham by Hagar, hence the term "Hagarism. Relying on hitherto neglected non-Muslim sources, CC give a new account of the rise of Islam: an account, on their admission, unacceptable to any Muslim.

The Muslim sources are too late, and unreliable, and there are no cogent external grounds for accepting the Islamic tradition. CC begin with a Greek text dated ca. There is evidence that the Jews themselves, far from being the enemies of Muslims, as traditionally recounted, welcomed and interpreted the Arab conquest in messianic terms.

The evidence "of Judeo-Arab intimacy is complemented by indications of a marked hostility towards Christianity. The same chronicle helps us understand how the Prophet "provided a rationale for Arab involvement in the enactment of Judaic messianism.

This rationale consists in a dual invocation of the Abrahamic descent of the Arabs as Ishmaelites: on the one hand to endow them with a birthright to the Holy Land, and on the other to provide them with a monotheist genealogy. The Arabs soon quarreled with the Jews, and their attitude to Christians softened; the Christians posed less of a political threat.

There still remained a need to develop a positive religious identity, which they proceeded to do by elaborating a full-scale religion of Abraham, incorporating many pagan practices but under a new Abrahamic aegis. But they still lacked the basic religious structures to be able to stand on their two feet, as an independent religious community. Here they were enormously influenced by the Samaritans.

The origins of the Samaritans are rather obscure. They are Israelites of central Palestine, generally considered the descendants of those who were planted in Samaria by the Assyrian kings, in about B. The faith of the Samaritans was Jewish monotheism, but they had shaken off the influence of Judaism by developing their own religious identity, rather in the way the Arabs were to do later on.

The Samaritan canon included only the Pentateuch, which was considered the sole source and standard for faith and conduct. The formula "There is no God but the One" is an ever-recurring refrain in Samaritan liturgies.

A constant theme in their literature is the unity of God and His absolute holiness and righteousness. We can immediately notice the similarity of the Muslim proclamation of faith: "There is no God but Allah.

The Muslim formula "In the name of God" bismillah is found in Samaritan scripture as beshem. The opening chapter of the Koran is known as the Fatiha, opening or gate, often considered as a succinct confession of faith. A Samaritan prayer, which can also be considered a confession of faith, begins with the words: Amadti kamekha al fatah rahmeka, "I stand before Thee at the gate of Thy mercy.

The differences reflected the partially oral transmission of the text, which is to say they are of the sort we expect to see when an oral text is written down. These differences sometimes affected the meaning, but they did not change the basic ideas of the Koran.

For example, they did not affect the scripture's notions about the nature of God or change major religious obligations. Around AD, the Caliph Uthman, who himself had been a close associate of the Prophet, had a committee establish an official version of the Koran based on the existing copies of the scripture and the knowledge of experts.

It is reasonable to conjecture that he worried about textual diversity and wanted to promote textual uniformity. He sent this official version to different cities and people began copying it. This Uthmanic textual tradition dwarfed and ultimately replaced the traditions of Ibn Masud and other Companion codices everywhere in the Muslim world, thus fulfilling Uthman's aim of greater textual uniformity from place to place.

Uthman's act of standardization succeeded in reducing textual variation, but did not eliminate it altogether. The text established by Uthman accommodated multiple readings. Because the script in which the early Korans were written lacked most of the vowels and marks that could distinguish several of the consonants, it was possible to read the text in different ways.

To be sure, oral tradition placed a check on variation, disallowing many otherwise feasible readings. Nonetheless, numerous variant readings arose. There are many parallels in the Koran and the Bible in terms of the historical events they detail, though their interpretations may differ to a significant degree.

The recitation of the Koran during Muslim prayer time is to be done only in Arabic. The Prophet Muhammad was believed to have been given the Koran's teachings in a cave called "Hira". This cave is located about 2 miles from Mecca in Saudi Arabia. Although Muslims visit the cave en masse, it is not considered as part of the Hajj pilgrimage route, even though it has an estimated 5, daily visitors during the Hajj season.

Muhammad found the cave after he immigrated into Medina and has followers came with him. As the Koran was being revealed to him, Muhammad also taught it to his companions. He encouraged them to spread God's laws and, in time, the teachings were written upon palm fronds, bones, and tablets.

And ideally—though obviously not always in reality—Islamic history has been the effort to pursue and work out the commandments of the Koran in human life. If the Koran is a historical document, then the whole Islamic struggle of fourteen centuries is effectively meaningless.

The orthodox Muslim view of the Koran as self-evidently the Word of God, perfect and inimitable in message, language, style, and form, is strikingly similar to the fundamentalist Christian notion of the Bible's "inerrancy" and "verbal inspiration" that is still common in many places today. The notion was given classic expression only a little more than a century ago by the biblical scholar John William Burgon.

Not all the Christians think this way about the Bible, however, and in fact, as the Encyclopaedia of Islam points out, "the closest analogue in Christian belief to the role of the Kur'an in Muslim belief is not the Bible, but Christ.

The prospect of a Muslim backlash has not deterred the critical-historical study of the Koran, as the existence of the essays in The Origins of the Koran demonstrate.

Nevo, of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, detailing seventh- and eighth-century religious inscriptions on stones in the Negev Desert which, Nevo suggested, pose "considerable problems for the traditional Muslim account of the history of Islam. Crone is one of the most iconoclastic of these scholars.

During the s and s she wrote and collaborated on several books—most notoriously, with Michael Cook, Hagarism: The Making of the Islamic World —that made radical arguments about the origins of Islam and the writing of Islamic history. Among Hagarism 's controversial claims were suggestions that the text of the Koran came into being later than is now believed "There is no hard evidence for the existence of the Koran in any form before the last decade of the seventh century" ; that Mecca was not the initial Islamic sanctuary "[the evidence] points unambiguously to a sanctuary in north-west Arabia Mecca was secondary" ; that the Arab conquests preceded the institutionalization of Islam "the Jewish messianic fantasy was enacted in the form of an Arab conquest of the Holy Land" ; that the idea of the hijra, or the migration of Muhammad and his followers from Mecca to Medina in , may have evolved long after Muhammad died "No seventh-century source identifies the Arab era as that of the hijra " ; and that the term "Muslim" was not commonly used in early Islam "There is no good reason to suppose that the bearers of this primitive identity called themselves 'Muslims' [but] sources do Hagarism came under immediate attack, from Muslim and non-Muslim scholars alike, for its heavy reliance on hostile sources.

But Crone has continued to challenge both Muslim and Western orthodox views of Islamic history. In Meccan Trade and the Rise of Islam she made a detailed argument challenging the prevailing view among Western and some Muslim scholars that Islam arose in response to the Arabian spice trade. Puin's current thinking about the Koran's history partakes of this contemporary revisionism. Even within the Islamic traditions there is a huge body of contradictory information, including a significant Christian substrate; one can derive a whole Islamic anti-history from them if one wants.

Patricia Crone defends the goals of this sort of thinking. Nobody would mind the howls if they came from Westerners, but Westerners feel deferential when the howls come from other people: who are you to tamper with their legacy? But we Islamicists are not trying to destroy anyone's faith. Not everyone agrees with that assessment—especially since Western Koranic scholarship has traditionally taken place in the context of an openly declared hostility between Christianity and Islam.

Indeed, the broad movement in the West over the past two centuries to "explain" the East, often referred to as Orientalism , has in recent years come under fire for exhibiting similar religious and cultural biases.

The Koran has seemed, for Christian and Jewish scholars particularly, to possess an aura of heresy; the nineteenth-century Orientalist William Muir, for example, contended that the Koran was one of "the most stubborn enemies of Civilisation, Liberty, and the Truth which the world has yet known.

In Islam and Russia , Ann K. Lambton summarized much of this work, and wrote that several Soviet scholars had theorized that "the motive force of the nascent religion was supplied by the mercantile bourgeoisie of Mecca and Medina"; that a certain S.

Tolstov had held that "Islam was a social-religious movement originating in the slave-owning, not feudal, form of Arab society"; and that N. Morozov had argued that "until the Crusades Islam was indistinguishable from Judaism and Not surprisingly, then, given the biases of much non-Islamic critical study of the Koran, Muslims are inclined to dismiss it outright. Parvez Manzoor. Placing the origins of Western Koranic scholarship in "the polemical marshes of medieval Christianity" and describing its contemporary state as a "cul-de-sac of its own making," Manzoor orchestrated a complex and layered assault on the entire Western approach to Islam.

He opened his essay in a rage. Despite such resistance, Western researchers with a variety of academic and theological interests press on, applying modern techniques of textual and historical criticism to the study of the Koran.

That a substantial body of this scholarship now exists is indicated by the recent decision of the European firm Brill Publishers—a long-established publisher of such major works as The Encyclopaedia of Islam and The Dead Sea Scrolls Study Edition —to commission the first-ever Encyclopaedia of the Qur'an. Jane McAuliffe, a professor of Islamic studies at the University of Toronto, and the general editor of the encyclopedia, hopes that it will function as a "rough analogue" to biblical encyclopedias and will be "a turn-of-the-millennium summative work for the state of Koranic scholarship.

The Encyclopaedia of the Qur'an will be a truly collaborative enterprise, carried out by Muslims and non-Muslims, and its articles will present multiple approaches to the interpretation of the Koran, some of which are likely to challenge traditional Islamic views—thus disturbing many in the Islamic world, where the time is decidedly less ripe for a revisionist study of the Koran.

The plight of Nasr Abu Zaid , an unassuming Egyptian professor of Arabic who sits on the encyclopedia's advisory board, illustrates the difficulties facing Muslim scholars trying to reinterpret their tradition.

THE Koran is a text, a literary text, and the only way to understand, explain, and analyze it is through a literary approach," Abu Zaid says. The court then proceeded, on the grounds of an Islamic law forbidding the marriage of an apostate to a Muslim, to order Abu Zaid to divorce his wife, Ibtihal Yunis a ruling that the shocked and happily married Yunis described at the time as coming "like a blow to the head with a brick".

Abu Zaid steadfastly maintains that he is a pious Muslim, but contends that the Koran's manifest content—for example, the often archaic laws about the treatment of women for which Islam is infamous—is much less important than its complex, regenerative, and spiritually nourishing latent content.

The orthodox Islamic view, Abu Zaid claims, is stultifying; it reduces a divine, eternal, and dynamic text to a fixed human interpretation with no more life and meaning than "a trinket For a while Abu Zaid remained in Egypt and sought to refute the charges of apostasy, but in the face of death threats and relentless public harassment he fled with his wife from Cairo to Holland, calling the whole affair "a macabre farce.

No one will even dare to think about harming Islam again. Abu Zaid seems to have been justified in fearing for his life and fleeing: in the Egyptian journalist Farag Foda was assassinated by Islamists for his critical writings about Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood, and in the Nobel Prize-winning novelist Naguib Mahfouz was stabbed for writing, among other works, the allegorical Children of Gabalawi —a novel, structured like the Koran, that presents "heretical" conceptions of God and the Prophet Muhammad.

Deviating from the orthodox interpretation of the Koran, says the Algerian Mohammed Arkoun, a professor emeritus of Islamic thought at the University of Paris, is "a very sensitive business" with major implications. To its immediate west lies the flat and sweltering Red Sea coast; to the east stretches the great Rub' al-Khali, or Empty Quarter—the largest continuous body of sand on the planet.

The town's setting is uninviting: the earth is dry and dusty, and smolders under a relentless sun; the whole region is scoured by hot, throbbing desert winds. Although sometimes rain does not fall for years, when it does come it can be heavy, creating torrents of water that rush out of the hills and flood the basin in which the city lies.

As a backdrop for divine revelation, the area is every bit as fitting as the mountains of Sinai or the wilderness of Judea. The only real source of historical information about pre-Islamic Mecca and the circumstances of the Koran's revelation is the classical Islamic story about the religion's founding, a distillation of which follows.

In the centuries leading up to the arrival of Islam, Mecca was a local pagan sanctuary of considerable antiquity.