The Legacy of Solomon
Page 54
If the Bible is a compilation of different texts designed to give a history of a mixed people what about the Koran?’
‘Same thing, today all Muslims have an extraordinary reverence for the Koran, it is the holy of holies. For example the sacred book must never lay beneath other books, always on top, you must never drink or smoke when it is being read aloud, and it must be listened to in silence,’ Professor Nasseri explained to them.
In the past Europeans such as Gibbon considered it an incoherent rhapsody of fable, for Carlyle it was insupportable stupidity, whilst the German scholar Salomon Reinach said:
From the literary point of view, the Koran has little merit. Declamation, repetition, puerility, a lack of logic and coherence strike the unprepared reader at every turn. It is humiliating to the human intellect to think that this mediocre literature has been the subject of innumerable commentaries, and that millions of men are still wasting time absorbing it.
‘What is your position Professor?’ asked O’Connelly delicately. ‘I mean myself I know very little about Islam or the Koran, of course the subject is present everywhere, it’s quite extraordinary that in the space of a little more than a generation Islam has become the subject of so much debate in the Europe. In the early sixties I didn’t even know what a Muslim was, I had heard of Mohamed and Mohammedans from history books, we were always fighting them in Khartoum or at the Khyber Pass. I even remember there was an Anglo-Indian in my office, he was Muslim, but I never asked him what a Muslim was because it was of no importance!’
‘Things have changed, the world has become wider!’
‘Yes.’
‘Myself I’m an academic and Egyptologist, I am also a believer, however my scientific training allows me to question many things, though it does not alter my faith in God. For me I see no reason why the Koran cannot be studied using the same techniques of Biblical criticism, though in Egypt this most be done with the utmost discretion and in academic scientific circles, otherwise we would have a riot on our hands.’
‘So how did the Koran come down to us? Who compiled it?’
‘That’s a very good point, who wrote it and when was it written? According to Muslims the Koran was revealed to Muhammad, by an angel, little by little until his death in 632AD. How it had been written down at the time of Muhammad’s death is unclear, there is no evidence of a single manuscript covering the whole of the revelation, though tradition tells us the Prophet dictated it to his secretaries.’
Professor Nasseri continued his explanation telling them how after the Prophets death Abu Bakr became the second Caliph from 632 to 634. Omar, concerned many Muslims who knew the Koran by heart died during the Battle of Yamama, decided that all the parts of the Koran be gathered together before they was lost for ever. Abu Bakr agreed, and Zayd ibn Thabit, who had been the Prophet’s secretary, was given the task collecting the Koran’s different texts that existed on a variety of different materials: papyrus, flat stones, palm leaves, shoulder blades and ribs of animals, pieces of leather and wooden boards, as well as from men’s minds. The collected texts were transcribed onto paper and handed down to the Prophets descendants.
The collected texts remained in the hands of Zayd ibn Thabit and his family until the third Caliph Uthman order Zayd ibn Thabit to make an official text after arguments had broken out among his soldiers as to the correct readings of the Koran. Zayd’s texts were compared with those held by Omar’s daughter and using the dialect of the Quraysh, the Prophet’s tribe Zayd completed the work in about 650AD and all other versions were ordered to be destroyed.
A problem however remained, since today’s Koran is not dialectal Arabic, though specialists accept that the text was written at the time of Uthman between 650 and 656, as to who compiled is not clear whether it was Abu Bakr or Uthman, though it is generally assumed that the final form came into being under the third Caliph Uthman.
According to certain traditions Muhammad could not read or write, therefore was what God revealed to him perfectly transmitted and a number of questions arise concerning the reliability of oral transmission by early Muslims and the texts in the possession of Umars daughter. The fact that oral traditions have a propensity to vary with time means that it is more than probable that the Koran as it exists today underwent change before arriving in its final written form, not to speak of politically or religiously inspired insertions, cuts and modifications.
In spite of these facts Muslims adamantly refuse any discussion concerning the Koran, this was not the case in the early years of Islam when Muslims had a more flexible approach, aware that parts of the Koran had been lost or modified. To unify the peoples of the Caliphate Uthman therefore created a unique and final version of the Koran called the Medina Codex, copies of which were distributed to all the towns and cities of the Caliphate and all other existing versions of the Prophets words were destroyed.
At the time the Koran was written Syro-Aramaic was the most commonly used cultural and written language in the region where Mohammed and his immediate successors lived. Educated Arabs used Aramaic as their written language though it was slowly being replaced by Arabic in the seventh century. Thus the Koran often employs a grammatical structure based on Arabic and Syro-Aramaic.
Written Arabic grammatical rules did not appear until around 780AD and up until that time the written language was uniquely composed of consonants. These had different forms and more important there were no written vowels, thus the Koran was written in what we call a scripta defectiva. The written alphabet was composed of just seventeen letters and one letter could stand for two or more letters.
Grammatical rules were fixed at that time by the Persian Sibawayh, but by that time the language had evolved to a degree that it was no longer identical to that of the Koran, leading to problems of interpretation and reading. Without vowels a reader had to determine not only the pronunciation but also the meaning of each word and its grammatical form. This led to the development of a scripta plena in the ninth century.
However, more than two hundred years had passed since the death of the Prophet plus the fact that several texts existed in spite of Uthman’s orders to destroy all other texts. Therefore the Koran was reorganised into chapters on the basis of their length rather than the order of revelation or the nature of the subjects.
It was not until three hundred years after Mohammed’s death that seven systems of reading the texts were fixed by ibn Muqlah and ibn Isa with the help of a learned scholar ibn Mujahad. They decided that this was canonical, and the only way vowels could be denoted in the text. As time passed five of these systems were abandoned, then finally what is called the text of Hafs became the universal accepted form when the printed form came into being.
‘So you see my friends the Koran for us modest scholars is filled with interpolations, some of which are a form of exegesis, though others are of a more dogmatic or political nature.’
‘So the Koran took on form slowly with modifications and additions not unlike the Jewish Bible?’
‘You could say that, the difference being that the Koran is not a history of the Arabic peoples or their land, but a divine revelation.’
‘So the Bible is not a revelation?’
‘I did not say that my dear, the Bible is a mixture of revelation, laws and history.’
‘What do we know of Mohammed himself?’
‘The earliest material relating to the Prophet's life that we have was written in about 750AD by ibn Ishaq, that’s a hundred twenty years after his death. Ibn Ishaq relied mostly on oral tradition, so there is a question of reliability as the story would have certainly been very much modified during those intervening years.’
‘Have these texts been translated?’
‘Yes and no, unfortunately ibn Ishaq’s work was lost and all we have are some extracts written by ibn Hisham who died more than half a century after ibn Ishaq.’
‘What about the Hadiths?’
‘The Hadiths are a collection of sayings and doings attributed to
the Prophet. They were transmitted dependable eye witnesses, these include the story of the compilation of the Koran, and the sayings of the Prophet’s disciples. Again the problem is that they were compiled and edited more than two hundred years after the Prophet’s. Unfortunately many were invented at a time when there were no books when leaders of all kinds made up sayings to suit their own ends. Finally Bukhari compiled six supposedly authentic collections of Hadiths.’
‘There must have been a good deal of historic reference to the Prophet from other sources?’
‘There is of course written Islamic law, dating back to about a century after the Prophet’s death. This was in fact derived from law under the Ummayads that became Islamic law. Then the first Koranic quotations appeared on coins and inscriptions towards the end of the seventh century.’
‘So they confirm what was written in the Koran?’
‘No these vary with the canonical text, which shows the text of the Koran had not yet been fixed.’
‘And other than Arab references?’
‘Well, the earliest Greek source we have, speaks of Muhammad being alive in 634, which is two years after his death according to Muslim tradition.’
‘In Jerusalem we visited the Dome of the Rock, can you tell us how Jerusalem came to play a role in Islam?’
‘Palestine played an important role in Muslim traditions, because of the Prophets dream, but not only that, with the expansion of the Arabs Palestine became a target and the religious aspect was motive for its conquest.’
The Professor look at his watch, ‘My goodness I’ve been talking so much, we’re going to be late they are waiting for us at the Museum.’
‘Tomorrow the Museum is closed so perhaps you would like to arrange another visit?’
‘Closed?’
‘Yes Friday prayers.’
‘Oh yes, of course.’
‘It’s an interesting story Friday prayers. It was a weekly event for the Prophet, and was transformed into a regular, public meeting, where the governor in the absence of the caliph presided. So it was a religious and administrative function because of the presence of a representative of political authority. This regular meeting therefore united the religious and political functioning of the community.
The early Muslim conquests transformed the Arabs and created the need for the organisation of Islam as a state religion and doctrine. Friday prayer meetings became one of the official pillars of Islam where a special class known as al-Qurra was given the task of spreading the knowledge of Islamic doctrine according to the Prophet and his message in the form of the Koran, which formed the base of the Arabs’ doctrinal philosophy following the death of Islam’s founder.’
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A Jesuit in Angkor