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What do we know about the historical process of the formation of the Qur’an?

Mohamed Sghir Janjar

Translation Canon Tony Dickinson

There are today two ways of responding to the question which takes the place of a title for this article. On the one side, the traditional one of the various strands of “Qur’anic learning”, taught for centuries in the theological institutions of Islam. On the other, the scholarly western approach which developed with the coming of the human sciences and which approaches the Qur’anic text with the critical methods which have been applied to the Bible since the mid-19th century. Now, if the resources of the traditional Islamic method have long been an object of scientific investigation for western research, historical-critical approaches are, even today, largely ignored or even rejected by Islamic research and teaching institutions.

The question of the formation of the Qur’an is undoubtedly the best indicator for measuring the trench that separates these two intellectual universes. If from the point of view of the classical system of Islamic theology such a question can seem absurd, for the dominant current in contemporary Islamic thought, it is at the very most an ideological construct erected by malevolent western Orientalists.

The process of formation of the Qur’an which is the point in question here corresponds to the historical period between the initial appearance of the message and its taking shape in the closed corpus represented by the official vulgate, the mushaf (a written composition between two covers), namely the book canonised and venerated by all the constituent parts of the Muslim community. For it is commonly admitted, by Islamic tradition as well as by a large part of the specialists in Qur’anic studies, that before becoming the sacred book and foundation of the Muslim religion, Muhammad’s preaching had been for twenty-two years (610-632) an essentially oral communication.

What do we know about this historical process?

From Revelation to Book: elements of the Islamic narrative

For a contemporary Muslim nurtured by the inheritance transmitted thanks to the Sunni and Shi’ite traditions there is no possibility of doubting that he knows what is essential about the formation of the Qur’an. Starting out from the act of faith according to which the materiality of the Qur’anic text is the very Word of God, the believer who recites the Qur’an thinks that he is in direct contact not only with the phenomenality of the divine word (the text), but also with its eternal « essence ».

What does the Islamic tradition say about the origins of its foundation text? It was in the course of the first three centuries of Islam that the edifying and sacred account of the tradition was forged, beginning with the interpretation of a group of Qur’anic verses considered as effectively self-referential definitions. In the view of this account, the first appearance of the Qur’anic message has nothing human or historical about it. It is first and foremost a miraculous event, a grace or a « gift » of God who has chosen Muhammad uniquely to be its receiver.

The Qur’an self-describes as a « secret and mysterious communication », destined for Muhammad by two principal modes: descent (Tanzil) and inspiration (Wahy). However, the dominant understanding of these two modes of communication between heaven and earth is not presented, as in the Judaeo-Christian tradition, in the form of meanings inspired in the prophets, but rather as a divine dictation exercise realised through the intervention of the angel Gabriel. We read there the description of the mission of the prophet of Islam in terms such as those of the following verse: « Thus have We sent you into a community before which many others have passed away, so that you may recite what We have revealed to you, although they deny the Merciful One. » (Qur’an 13:30).

Contrary to the Jewish or Christian traditions which, while recognising the « inspired » character of the Scriptures, grant to human beings the responsibility for formulating the divine meaning in the language of their time, the Islamic tradition accords to the Prophet only the passive role of transmitting uncreated divine words. That is the explanation for, among other things, the living and constant reticence of the dominant currents of Muslim theology with regard to any form of human involvement in the process of producing the Qur’anic text.

As a miraculous event, the Qur’an is, from the point of view of Muslim theology, the proof of the prophetic ministry of Muhammad. And so much the more as the Qur’an names him « al-nabî al-ummi » (as in Qur’an 12:157), an expression understood in the sense of « unlettered prophet », following a wide-spread tradition. This expression would indeed have served in the polemics against those among the « People of the Book » who cast doubt on the prophethood of Muhammad, accusing him of drawing on different ancient religious sources. In fact this is an interpretation increasingly contested by the specialists, including some Muslim exegetes. Renewed examination of the expression « al-nabî al-ummi » in the light of the Qur’anic context suggests rather that it should be understood as « the one who has not received the holy book », which corresponds more closely with the way in which the Qur’an presents the polytheistic environment in which Muhammad was born.

In the third century of the Hegira (the ninth century of the Christian era), with the development of exegesis and different Qur’anic sciences, an area of religious study grew up around the idea of the inimitability (‘i’jaz) of the Qur’an. This is based essentially on the interpretation of a series of Qur’anic verses, such as verse 88 of surah 17: « Say: ‘if mortals and djinns joined to produce something like the Qur’an, they would fail, even though they were supporters one of another.' » Now, this interpretation would quickly acquire the force of a dogma.

We find this idea reactivated at the beginning of the 20th century as a consequence of the shock of scientific and technical modernity in order to serve as the basis of concordist commentaries which did not hesitate to have recourse to modern science from an apologetical perspective. The commentary of the Egyptian Tantawi Jawhari (d. 1940) is thus at the beginning of this current in the Arab world. His ideas were popularised thanks to the essays of the doctor Mustafa Mahmoud as well as by the publications of the French doctor Maurice Bucaille whose work entitled « The Bible, the Qur’an and Science » had a huge influence among Francophone Muslim preachers.

However it must be noted that this vision of revelation and of the prophethood of Muhammad has not always been hegemonic. For until the beginning of the tenth century Arabo-Muslim sources echo a plurality of theological debates about the status of the Qur’an and its composition, even its contents. In parallel with what would become the majority Sunni current, there developed, during a particular period, the Mu’tazilite thesis which, while wholly adhering to the idea of a divinely inspired Qur’an, upheld the view that its linguistic materiality was created – which certainly released a real rational reflection on the Qur’an.

Furthermore, the internal wars of the first centuries of Islam were translated into intense theological controversies about the circumstances in which the scriptural sources (the Qur’an and the Hadith) came into being. This is the situation, particularly, of the Shi’ite sources which, during the first three centuries, criticised the first Caliphs and the Umayyad authorities for having massively manipulated the Qur’anic text to change the passages in it which gave primacy to the Alids (descendants of Ali, the fourth Caliph) in directing the community after the death of the Prophet. Some sources even claimed that Ali organised a recension of the Qur’anic revelations of Muhammad’s lifetime, while others make him the master of hermeneutics and the one who holds the power to reveal the hidden meaning of the Revelation.

The origin of the written support

The doctrine which finally triumphed in the heart of the Muslim world considers that the official text of the Qur’an which has come down to us was established on the orders of the third Caliph, ‘Uthman (644-655). However, many sources, including Sunni sources, consider that the process of putting the Qur’an into writing began in the time of the first Caliph, Abû Bakr, who ordered his recension after noting that a great number of Muslims who knew the Qur’an by heart had died during the wars of secession (Ridda). The fruit of this operation remained his private property, then that of his successor, the Caliph Omar (634-644). At all events, this version has not satisfied a number of historians who doubt that these first compilations had an official character.

Despite there fact that there is no manuscript of the Qur’an which dates back to the time of Muhammad’s preaching, Muslim tradition maintains that the use of writing as a means of preserving the revelation is attested since the Meccan period. In the same way it cites the lists of secretaries of the Prophet who were charged, especially at Medina, with transcribing the Qur’anic message. However, there is no material element which allows us to think that at the death of Muhammad, in 632, the Muslim community had access to a text integrating the totality of the revelations in the form of a book.

On the contrary, we know from Muslim sources that, despite the various campaigns of destruction of the unofficial versions of the Qur’an during the reign of ‘Uthman or that of the Umayyad Caliph Abd el-Malik (685-705), numerous important versions continued to circulate for a long time after the first century of the Hegirah (such as the codices of Ubayy ibn Ka’b [d. 642], Ali, cousin and son-in-law of the Prophet [d. 661], Aisha, Muhammad’s wife [d. 678], Abû Musâ [d. 662], and Ibn ‘Abbas [d. 688]).

[Note: the codex is the first form of books as we know them, consisting of manuscript leaves bound together]

The tradition echoes the order given three centuries later, in 1007, with a view to destroying the corpus attributed to Ibn Mas’ûd (d. 653). His version included, according to the sources, the greatest differences in comparison with the official vulgate of ‘Uthman, since it included neither the first Surah (Fatiha), nor the last two (113 and 114). Furthermore, it adopted a different ordering of the text. We must, however, note that the manuscript tradition of the Qur’an has not transmitted any of these texts to us, in the same way as there exists no autograph manuscript from Muhammad or one near to the period of the revelation.

Despite the disagreements setting specialists in opposition to one another over the dating of the oldest manuscripts of the Qur’an, it is admitted that the majority date from the ninth-tenth centuries. There are, however, some fragments of older exemplars, such as those discovered in the Grand Mosque in Sanaa, in the Yemen, in 1973. Furthermore, the press, both western and Arab, has recently re-echoed with the discovery of several manuscript pages on parchment containing verses from the Qur’an (surahs 18-20) in hijazi script (an ancient Arabian style of calligraphy) whose carbon dating allows us to conclude that the text was written between 568 and 645 of the Christian era.

These codices have long been considered in the light of what Islamic tradition reports about the « qirâ’ât » (readings), in other words versions of the same text which are distinguished only by minor differences in form. But the discovery in 1973, among the thousands of fragments hidden in the roof of the Great Mosque in Sana’a, of a palimpsest [Note: a parchment on which the original writing has been erased in order to write a new text.] which contained forty or so pages bearing a text that differs from the vulgate, confirms, as François Déroche has noted, « the existence of rival versions and the losses which the accounts of destruction suggest. »

The process of creating the Canon; history and tradition

Such are the main lines of the traditional account tracing the evolution of the Qur’anic message from its first state as oral communication to its final form which we know today, the so-called mushaf of Uthman. Let us note that with the belated canonisation of this text there was imposed on the consciousness of Muslims, including the minority tendencies, the unshakable belief that the actual manuscript represents the faithful transcription of the revelations received by the Prophet.

In the form which has come down to us, the manuscript of the Qur’an is composed of 114 chapters (surahs) of varying lengths, ranging from a few sentences to several pages, themselves subdivided into nearly six thousand two hundred verses (âyat), according to the different systems of division. Qur’anic sciences in Islam divide them into two types of surah, according to the place of their revelation: those from Mecca and those from Medina. However, the ordering of the text adopted since the establishment of the official vulgate does not follow the chronology of the revelation but rather the length of the surahs, going, on the whole, from the longest to the shortest and in this way mingling passages from Mecca with those from Medina.

A number of experts in Islam refer the literalism which dominates Qur’anic exegesis, the resistance to or rejection of critical, contextual and rational re-readings of the Qur’anic text, to the weak sense of history which the Islamic tradition shows. Now everything seems to indicate that since its beginnings Muslim awareness was nurtured by historiographical accounts. To differentiate itself from the two older forms of monotheism (Judaism and Christianity), where the memories of the first beginnings are buried under strata of mythical accounts, Islam very soon gave itself the image of a religion born « under the light of history », as Abdullah Larwi expresses it.

Commenting on this idea, A. Filali-Ansary places the accent on two reasons which are at the root of the particular vision which Muslims have of the history of their holy book and of their religion in general. The first belongs to the panorama of religions and of the ancient peoples which the Qur’an paints and which has quickly taken, in Qur’anic exegesis, the form of a universal history of religions of which Islam is teleologically the outcome and the closure. The second reason derives from the first in that a historiographical practice effectively appeared very early in Islam and has been pursued without interruption until the arrival of the new ways of writing history devised by modernity, covering in this way the different episodes beginning with the life of the Prophet until the end of the Ottoman empire. As A. Filali-Ansary quite rightly underlines, this « overflow » of Islamic historiographical discourse ended by convincing generations of Muslims ‘that « what is necessary has been done » and that the required work of evaluation and screening has been carried out in the best conditions [and that] in this way we have at our disposal an authentic, unarguable version of the facts and the texts that matter.’

The intellectual risk of modern times is that such a feeling of historiographical satiation nurtured by the great narrative of the Islamic tradition nowadays breeds a double misunderstanding: on one side, that of the nature of the epistemological rupture brought about by the arrival of the human sciences in the modes of modern knowing: on the other, ignorance both of the historic misery which characterises thought and of historic practice in the contemporary Islamic context.

For want of a move into the age of critical reasoning, the great majority of contemporary Muslims seem to be caught in the snare of being unable to distinguish between the historical facts and the narrative of them given by the tradition. While such a narrative continues, as in the past, to provide the community with meaning and gives it thereby the illusion of having at its disposal a knowledge that is sure, accessible and ready for use, research into historical facts and their analysis demands the uprooting of continuities which the irruption of modernity has already broken.

The history of the Qur’an in modern research

Since the first decades of the 19th century, western research into the Qur’an has invested, with approaches and hypotheses that are constantly being renewed, in three major areas: (1) the influence of Jewish and Christian traditions on the forms and contents of the Qur’an; (2) the reconstruction of the chronology of the Qur’an; (3) the description of the contents and themes of the Qur’an (which certain Islamic scholars, such as Fazlur Brahman, reckon is still the poor relation of modern research concerning the Qur’an).

The inaugural phase of this research was supplied by the German historical and philological school to which we owe, in the first two areas, some seminal work. This is the case with work of Abraham Geiger (1810-1874) and Hartwig Hirschfeld (1854-1934) (bearing on the impact of Judaism in the Qur’an) as it is with that of the scientific workshop initiated by Theodor Nöldeke (1836-1930) with regard to the history and chronology of the Qur’an. This task was followed up by his disciple, Friedrich Schwally (1863-1919), who published the revised edition of his work.

But contrary to the respectful attitude toward the tradition of classical Islamic studies which a pioneer like Nöldeke adopted, the second generation of western historians and philologists did not hesitate to brush aside certain elements of the traditional Islamic account, notably the supposed collection of the Qur’an during the reign of Abû Bakr. This critical attitude towards Islamic sources was accentuated in Great Britain with Richard Bell, Montgomery Watt and John Burton, who called into question the traditional Islamic account of the collection and redaction of the Qur’an in favour of the idea of a rapid finalisation of the Qur’anic text under the supervision of Muhammad.

At the beginning of the 1970s, and after almost a century and a half of modern Qur’anic studies, western researchers still had not reached a consensus about the dating of the process of fixing the Qur’an. Schwally adopted the dating developed by the dominant Sunni tradition (vulgate established in the time of Caliph Uthman), while Alphonse Mingana (1878-1937) was to cast doubt, at the beginning of the 20th century, on the credibility of Islamic sources written more than 150 years after the age of the Prophet and to consider, in the light of Syriac sources produced in Christian settings, that the official codex saw the light of day in the age of the Umayyad Caliph Abd al-Malik. On his side, John Burton presented the synthesis of theses defended by numerous British researchers already cited, according to which the official version of the Qur’an dates from the time of the prophet Muhammad.

The « hypercritical » current

Qur’anic studies would appear to be in a dead end, to the extent that the state of the ancient manuscripts does not allow us to settle the debate about the key questions concerning the history of the Qur’an, just as it made impossible the establishment of a critical edition of the Qur’an capable of responding to the criteria of a rigorous philology. Furthermore, work on Islamic sources does not appear to offer perspectives other than those presented by the narrative of a late Islamic tradition and taken up by western study of Islam since the nineteenth century.

It is in this context that there appeared, in the 1970s, a critical, or even « hypercritical », reaction, developed in the heart of certain centres of western Islamic studies. It is expressed in particular by the rejection of Arab and Islamic sources because of their distance in time in relation to the era of Muhammad’s preaching and to what followed it (and with which the process of collecting and fixing the text of the Qur’an was interlocked).

Among the significant works which expressed the ideas of the « hypercritical » current in a vigorous way, let us mention the books of G. Lueling, J. Wansbrough, P. Crone and M. Cook, Y.D. Nevo, as well as that of Ch. Luxenberg. For these authors, who might be described as « revisionist », everything that we know about the coming of the Qur’an, its formation and the fixing of the text, comes to us from Islamic sources which were edited more than a century after the passing of Muhammad, in the context of developing the Sira (biography of the Prophet), theology, exegesis and other Qur’anic sciences. Beyond their late character, the scholars criticise these sources for the contradictory nature of their information and the fact that they were marked by the weight of the history of a civil war in which the canonical version of the foundation text of Islam was a considerable political stake.

In interpreting in a maximalist sense the pluralism of the readings (qirâ’at) mentioned by Islamic tradition, these authors consider that a series of sorting operations were carried out by the victorious Umayyad, among the different readings and codices bequeathed by the essentially oral phase of Muhammad’s preaching. According to them, in this way the Qur’an as it is known today was the fruit of a historical repression of many varied strata of the Qur’anic text which were filtered before the canonical version of the Qur’an was imposed at the beginning of the tenth century.

Setting out from this premise, those who hold to a hypercritical approach put forward a new narrative of the formation of the Qur’an by recourse to philological and literary methods. That will give rise to two theories which are iconoclastic in the eyes of Muslim tradition as well as of the majority of researchers working on the history of the Qur’an.

The first is the theory of a proto-Qur’an, made up in part of fragments of hymns used in the liturgy of Christians in Mecca during the pre-Islamic period. First proposed by G. Lüling, this thesis was taken up by several writers from the same movement, such as Ch. Luxenberg, who stressed the decisive impact of the Syriac liturgy on the formation of the vocabulary of the Qur’an.

The second theory, put forward by J. Wansbrough, contains, undoubtedly, the most radical thesis, in so far as it supposes that the fixing of the text of the Qur’an was the fruit of a slow and long process which reached its conclusion in Mesopotamia more than two centuries after the death of Muhammad. Other researchers, such as P.Crone and M. Cook or Y.D. Nevo took the route outlined by Wansbrough to end up with even more radical hypotheses, which caused deep divisions in the international scientific community.

In the course of the last decades of the 20th century, and while the so-called « hypercritical » theories about the history of the Qur’an were being sketched out, the discovery of the Qur’anic manuscripts at Sana’a in 1973 seemed to inaugurate a new phase marked by the profusion of sources, manuscript and epigraphic as well as archaeological.

Let us mention, by way of indication, the resources exploited by the Corpus coranicum project directed by Angelika Neuwirth in Berlin, the reconstitution by François Déroche, who holds the chair in « History of the Qur’an: Text and transmission » at the Collège de France, of a codex, dating from the first century AH, working from copies of the Qur’an scattered across several collections in Paris and St Petersburg, as well as the accumulation of the results of archaeological excavations in the Arabian Peninsula, since the surveys carried out by the team of Abderrahman Tayyib Al-Ansari in Qaryat al-Fau during the 1970s and 1980s. These advances combined with the expansion of semiotic, semantic and rhetorical approaches to the text as well as with new methods in the study of codices made possible by technological changes (carbon 14 and ultraviolet radiation).

By way of conclusion

The increasing participation by young Muslims in the programmes of research into the Qur’an run by western universities, as well as the recent publication of a first critical edition of the Qur’an which takes account of the knowledge accumulated in the setting of the Islamic tradition as well as in modern Qur’anic studies, are indicators of the profound changes which the field of Qur’anic studies is experiencing today. That is not only putting an end to the state of « mutual ignorance » in which the two areas of Qur’anic studies, Islamic and western, have found themselves until now, but it seems also to indicate that the text of the Qur’an is making its entrance into the great history of religions. Such a de-essentialisation of the Qur’an is contributing in this way to restoring the text to its historical context and at the same time to liberating the consciousness of its contemporary readers from what Mohamed Arkoun has called the « dogmatic closure ».

For a long time the Qur’an has been approached by the one group as a text fundamentally foreign to western culture and by the other as a block of metahistorical truths providing meaning for a community of believers. Now we can see at the dawn of the 21st century that an epistemological revolution, in the image of the one which took place in the field of Biblical studies in the 18th and 19th centuries, seems to be sketched out in the domain of Qur’anic studies, contributing in this way to a convergence of questions and a redefinition of the frontiers between the cultures of east and west.

 

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