Qur’an (Koran)

Context

Late antiquity, the time from the general crisis that almost saw the collapse of the Roman Empire in the middle of the third century until the completion of the Arab conquests in the century after Muhammad’s death, saw a profusion of new literatures based upon the Jewish and Christian scriptures. The Mishnah and Talmudic literature, the system of commentaries on the Hebrew Bible that formed the main project of early rabbinic Judaism, created a new spiritual center for the Jewish world after Jewish national identity was lost in the failure of the Jewish revolt against Rome in 70 CE. At the same time, Christians produced a vast number of new gospels, quite different from the four Gospels of the New Testament, and other spiritual writings in conversation with the canonical texts; those gospels and writings are today called Gnostic scriptures. The point in both literatures was to find new meaning in traditional religious texts, so as to make them more useful in a world progressed several centuries from the original compositions; both movements were experiments with tradition. Rabbinic Judaism became a new form of Judaism that has endured into the modern world, while the Gnostics were brutally suppressed in favor of older forms of orthodoxy within the Christian tradition.

The Qur'an was an experiment of the same kind. Muhammad, who was almost certainly illiterate, was yet familiar with Jewish and Christian scripture, most likely from the personal contact with Jews and Christians that he is known to have had throughout his life. Both groups made a point of memorizing and reciting their scriptures. Even when scriptures were read in antiquity, they were almost always read aloud, such that the ancient experience of scripture, including the Qur'an, was primarily aural. Coming from a traditional polytheist background, Muhammad was profoundly affected by the monotheist scriptures and embraced the idea of a single god enthusiastically. He proceeded to develop the Qur'an through his own contemplative spiritual practice as a mystical revelation. He then transmitted the text in oral form to his followers in bits and pieces throughout his life. In the Qur'an, Muhammad retells many of the same myths as the Jewish and Christian scriptures, of Creation, of the Flood, of divine judgment. He acknowledges the divine inspiration of the Jewish prophets in the Hebrew Bible as well as of Jesus. But Muhammad believed that Jews and Christians had failed in implementing monotheism correctly. He was well aware of the frequent urban rioting and political revolts occasioned by disagreements among Christian sects over the nature of the Trinity that plagued the cities of Roman Syria in the early seventh century. To his way of thinking, monotheism ought to bring unity, not discord. In the Qur'an, Muhammad purposefully set out to perfect and complete the Jewish and Christian revelations, which he considered partial, or at least preliminary, and defective.

One Christian attitude toward Judaism, reflected in Lactantius’s Divine Institutes (ca. 310) and elsewhere, is that Christianity is the true religion of humanity given by God in the Garden of Eden, which was practiced by the Old Testament patriarchs but which, over time and through sin, was gradually corrupted into Judaism. In this view, Jesus came to restore what had been lost. The Qur'an adopts the same interpretation of history but sees Christianity as a second failed experiment. The Qur'an is a self-conscious reaction to the Hebrew Bible and New Testament and an attempt to rewrite them in a simpler, universalist manner. Muhammad succeeded to the extent that his new religion of Islam, as based on the Qur'an, became dominant nearly throughout the Roman and Sassanian empires. Between 632 and 715, Islam expanded by military conquest from its center on the Arabian Peninsula to absorb half the territories of the Roman Empire from Syria to Spain and the whole of Sassanian Iran, from Iraq into Inner Asia. Proselytization, especially within the expanding Mongol Empire, and further conquests extended Islam to much of the populations of Africa and India and throughout Indonesia. Today, a quarter of the world’s population is Muslim.

After his death, Muhammad’s companions began to make a serious effort to write down the Qur'an, which they had learned from him by memory. Muhammad’s successor ‘Uthman ibn ‘Affan, who reigned as the third caliph, or supreme ruler of the Islamic world, from 644 to 656, ordered one of Muhammad’s original scribes to make an official recension of the Qur'an based on the recollections and memoirs of the Prophet’s other companions, and he then destroyed all other evidence outside of that recension. While Islamic tradition holds that the modern Qur'an is the same as ‘Uthman’s text, Western scholars suspect that the text must have continued evolving, especially in dialogue with other faiths, for as long as two centuries more, the period from which the earliest manuscripts of the Qur'an survive.