Qur’an (Koran)

Explanation and Analysis of the Document

The Qur'an is divided into 114 chapters called suras. They are arranged, like the Mishnah (the rabbinic commentary on the Hebrew Bible), in order from the longest to the shortest rather than by topic, or chronologically, or some other scheme. Each sura is further divided into verses. The two selections reprinted here deal with important points: sura V with the relationship of Islam to the other “religions of the book,” Christianity and Judaism, and sura XVII with Muhammad’s night journey and the mystical nature and authority of the Qur'an itself.

Sura V

The fifth sura is titled “The Table” because it begins with a discussion of dietary restrictions. Besides limiting the diet of Muslims on pilgrimage to Mecca, Muhammad reinforces the prohibition of pork from the Hebrew Bible and plainly forbids Muslims from eating meat that comes from animals sacrificed to polytheist gods, giving a clear verdict on an issue that is the occasion of the apostle Paul’s most famously indecisive comments in the Bible (I Corinthians 10:14–32). The text continues with a number of purity regulations, none of which, characteristically of Islam, are absolute but are to be practiced as circumstances allow.

Muhammad soon turns to the most important topic of this sura, Jews and Christians and their relationship to Islam. The Qur'an states that the original covenant of god with the twelve tribes of Israel was a true and efficacious religion, but the Jews allowed their tradition to become corrupt: “They dislocate the words of the Pentateuch”—that is, the first five books of the Hebrew Bible—“from their places and have forgotten part of what they were admonished” (5:13). The Qur'an repeats many of the anti-Semitic commonplaces that circulated among the Christian communities of the Roman Empire, such as that the Jews are cursed by God and that they are deceptive in their business practices. Nevertheless, Muhammad commands Muslims to be merciful to Jews.

Muhammad also considers the Christian scriptures to be corrupt. It is to the errors in the scriptures that he attributes the terrible strife that was raging in the Roman Empire about the nature of the Trinity. Muhammad tells the Christians that he will renew God’s original message to them: “Now is our apostle come unto you, to make manifest unto you many things which ye concealed in the scriptures; and to pass over many things” (5:15). The Qur'an’s judgment is that Jesus is in no way divine, that he is not the son of God but was only a human prophet like Moses or Muhammad himself. The text proceeds in the form of a debate, in which possible objections that might be made by Jews or Christians are answered directly by God. Briefly, the Jews are instructed to follow Islam. God revealed the Torah, which in its uncorrupted original form was identical to the Gospels, while both of them, again in their original form, were identical to the Qur'an, which is now being revealed a third time to make up for the corruption of the earlier texts (5:46).

There follows a long exposition in which Muslims are forbidden to associate with Jews and Christians. This could serve two functions, depending upon the time when the text was written. If the text indeed goes as far back as the time of Muhammad’s residence in Medina, then it is an injunction to new Muslim converts from the Jewish community there to cut themselves off from family and a social network that might influence them to return to their traditional religion. Since, in his view, Muhammad offered Jews a perfected version of their own religion, he expected that they would be anxious to convert. But the Jews of Medina did not agree and proved highly resistant to Islam. Muhammad and his companions eventually defeated the three Jewish tribes of Medina in battle, exiling two of them and exterminating the third, killing all the adult males and enslaving the women and children. These seem like barbarous acts of cruelty today but were not exceptional in the ancient world. Indeed, the source for this tradition is the Siraitself, showing that Muslims did not find this action troubling. Alternatively, if the text of the Qur'an here reflects a later period of Islamic history, as some Western scholars suspect, the injunction against Muslims fraternizing with Jews could have been a means of discouraging insincere conversions that might have been made, for example, to avoid paying the special tax levied on non-Muslims (dhimmis) and other legal inequalities in the Islamic empire. Jews and Christians would have been less likely to make such a show of conversion if it meant cutting oneself off from family and community.

Muhammad turns his attention to Christianity and makes clear that any kind of Trinitarian formulation is to be considered blasphemous because God is a single, unique being. Jesus, therefore, cannot have been God. Muhammad attributes Trinitarian belief as well to scriptural corruption. The Qur'an asserts that Christians will be more easily converted than Jews. This, again, could reflect either Muhammad’s own expectations, since he did not try to convert large numbers of Christians during his own lifetime and so did not meet as much resistance from them, or the actual experience of the first few centuries of Islamic rule, since it seems that some Christians, at least, in the newly conquered territories accepted Islam as a way out of sectarian strife.

After a brief return to the dietary rules for those on pilgrimage and a consideration of how Muslims ought to make wills, the text returns to Christianity. The document again emphasizes that Jesus was a human agent of God and that his miracles were performed by God on his behalf, not by his own power. The list of miracles includes Jesus’s precocious speaking in the temple as a child (Luke 2:42–52), the healing of the man born blind (John 9:1–7), and raising the dead (John 11:41–44; Matthew 27:51–53). The miracle of Jesus’s bringing a clay figurine of a bird to life, which comes from the folklore that circulated about Jesus in late antique Syria, is less familiar. It is recorded in the apocryphal Infancy Gospel of Thomas (2:1–5) as something Jesus did in Nazareth when he was a few years old. In fact, it is reported there that the young Jesus made a dozen such bird statues on the Sabbath. When someone complained that he was breaking the Sabbath prohibition against work, Jesus simply brought the figurines to life and ordered them to fly away. The story was common enough that it is also cited in the Toldoth Jesu, an anti-Christian Jewish “Life of Jesus” written not much later than the Qur'an.

The talk of a meal descending from heaven merely means that the celebration of the Eucharist is to be considered a divinely inspired ritual. Muhammad emphasizes again that neither Jesus nor his mother, Mary, are to be considered divine beings. The intercessory status given to Mary in early Christian theology—making her a mediator between the faithful and God—is often viewed by outsiders (including Protestants as well as Muslims) as equating Mary, too, with God. Jesus’s own testimony before God at the last judgment is quoted against these propositions.

This sura mentions Sabians (5:69), who along with Jews, Christians, and Zoroastrians were considered people of the book, monotheists who were to be tolerated, albeit as second-class citizens, within Islamic society. What group Muhammad originally meant by the Sabians is far from clear. Perhaps it was the Mandaeans, a Gnostic group who venerate John the Baptist as their prophet and who lived until recently in Iraq (though, in the face of persecution through the modern-era Iraqi wars, almost the whole Mandaean population has been expelled, mostly to refugee camps in Syria but also to a growing ‚migr‚ community in Sweden). However, the term Sabian was famously taken up by the polytheists of the city of Harran in Syria, who claimed to be Sabians to spare themselves forced conversion during the Arab conquests of the seventh century. As polytheists, they were subject to be exterminated if they did not convert. But once they were accepted as Sabians, several Harranian families moved to the newly founded city of Baghdad and became instrumental in translating Greek literature into Arabic, laying the foundation for the Islamic philosophical achievements of the Middle Ages.

Sura XVII

Sura XVII begins with the Qur'an’s only description of one of the most important events from Muhammad’s life, his so-called night journey. The tradition about the composition of the Qur'an already suggests that Muhammad had been practicing some form of mystical exercise, going alone periodically to a cave in the desert. Muhammad began to perceive the Qur'an itself as a result of this mysticism, as God revealed it to him through the angel Gabriel. Mysticism is a religious phenomenon, but it is also a psychological phenomenon and in that sense is quite well understood. The mystic—and as many great mystics have been women as men—turns one’s senses away from the world, cutting oneself off from all the usual stimulation of sight and sound. A mystic may, like Muhammad, go away from other human beings, reduce the intake of food (which eventually quiets not only the desires associated with consumption and elimination but even sexual desires), and seek out a quiet, unchanging environment.

The mystic’s attention can be focused away from the world through concentrating on activities that become automatic, like chanting or praying memorized prayers. Once the channels of perception are cleared, the mind begins to look inward, to perceive interiorities that are completely outside the realm of everyday experience and which cannot be easily committed to language. The new experiences can range from new perspectives on life as the mystic has experienced it to startling visions that make it seem as if an entirely new universe is being perceived. The same kind of experiences have been had by mystics from every part of the world and from every religion, whether polytheist, Jewish, Christian, or Buddhist. The same experience is also available to atheists. Increasingly, the changes in brain function that are associated with mystical experience can be directly observed with new imaging techniques such as PET scans. The role of religious tradition in mysticism is to give a framework for the mystic’s understanding of his experience.

There can be little question that Muhammad gained the insight necessary to produce the Qur'an through a mystical practice. The first verse of sura XVII describes a mystical voyage that Muhammad experienced, a perception that he was traveling over a large part of the earth and to heaven and back in a single night. A later section (17:90–93) refers back to this experience and suggests that merely having the experience was not enough: Muhammad realized that he also needed to produce a book of scriptures so as to put Islam on the same footing as Judaism and Christianity.

The initial description of Muhammad’s night journey is somewhat vague. God moves him from the Kaaba in Mecca to the furthest temple, which to Muhammad’s audience could have suggested at least two places: either the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, where the Jewish temple built by Herod the Great (73–4 BCE) had once stood, or heaven. (The English Orientalist scholar George Sale’s 1734 translation, used here, follows Islamic tradition and plainly calls this the Jerusalem temple, but there is no specific place name given in the Arabic text of the Qur'an.) Muhammad’s later doubts about the experience make clear that he then went to heaven by ascending a ladder. It is not surprising that Muhammad expressed his experience in traditional religious terms. In ancient Semitic culture, heaven was considered a solid dome over a flat earth, so ascending to heaven merely involved a physical change in location. A ladder stretching from earth to heaven is perhaps the most typical Semitic expression of the connection between earth and heaven. The cult of stylites, Syrian holy men, both Christian and polytheist, who lived either for a few weeks each year or, in some cases, for their entire lives on top of pillars (in the manner of modern flagpole sitters), expressed the Semitic belief that merely gaining height is moving closer to God. The same idea is found in the Hebrew Bible, such as in Jacob’s ladder, by which the angels go between heaven and earth (Genesis 28:12, 31:13, 45).

Islamic tradition did not hesitate to expand on the brief and obscure references to Muhammad’s night journey in the Qur'an. According to the Sira, Muhammad first flew to Jerusalem and the Temple Mount, a journey called the Isra, on the magical steed Buraq. Once on the sacred mountain, Muhammad prayed with Abraham, Moses, and Jesus (stressing the continuity of the monotheistic faiths) and finally ascended to heaven (the Mi’raj) where he was given a tour by the angel Gabriel. The tour of heaven is a common motif of Semitic religious literature and can be found in many texts, including the apocryphal book of Enoch, the New Testament book of Revelation, and the Talmudic story of the four who entered Paradise. The religious interpretation of Muhammad’s night journey tied it to monotheist tradition but also demanded a new revelation of scripture that became the Qur'an. As Islam grew, the new religious framework tied the mystical experience and the scripture ever more firmly back to their source in tradition.