The Quranic Noah and the Making of the Islamic Prophet

Carlos A. Segovia

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9783110406054
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Still in its infancy because of the overly conservative views and methods assumed by the majority of scholars working in it since the mid-19th century, the field of early Islamic and quranic studies is one in which the very basic questions must nowadays be addressed with decision. Accordingly, this book tries to resituate the Qur'?n at the crossroads of the conversations of old, to which its parabiblical narratives witness, and explores how Muhammad's image – which was apparently modelled after that of the anonymous prophet repeatedly alluded to in the Qur'?n – originally matched that of other prophets and/or charismatic figures distinctive in the late-antique sectarian milieu out of which Islam gradually emerged. Moreover, it contends that the Quranic Noah narratives provide a first-hand window into the making of Muhammad as an eschatological prophet and further examines their form, content, purpose, and sources as a means of deciphering the scribal and intertextual nature of the Qur'?n as well as the Jewish-Christian background of the messianic controversy that gave birth to the new Arab religion. The previously neglected view that Muhammad was once tentatively thought of as a new Messiah challenges our common understanding of Islam's origins.

Chapter 1/Introduction: The Quranic Noah and the Re-mapping of Early Islamic Studies

The connections between formative Islam and late antique Judaism and Christianityhave long deserved the attention of scholars of Islamic origins. Since the 19th century, Mu

ammad’s early Christian background, his complex attitude – and that of his immediate followers – towards Jews and Christians, and thepresence of Jewish and Christian religious motifs in the quranic text and in the Ḥadīṯ corpus have been widely studied in the West. Yet from the 1970s onwardsa seemingly major shift has taken place in the study of Islam’s origins. Whereasthe grand narratives on the rise of Islam contained in at least some of the earliestMuslim writings have usually been taken to describe with some accuracy thehypothetical emergence of Islam in the Arabian Peninsula of the mid-7th-century,they are nowadays increasingly regarded as too late and ideologically biased – too eulogical, that is – to provide a reliable picture of Islam’s origins. Accordingly,new timeframes ranging from the late-7th to the mid-8th century and a numberof alternative geographies are currently being explored (see e.g.,Ohlig and Puin2010).

On the other hand, renewed attention is now also being paid to the once veryplausible redactional and editorial stages of the Qur’ān and, thereby, to its presumedpre-canonical Grundschirften, in which a number of encrypted passagesfrom the Old Testament Pseudepigrapha, the New Testament Apocrypha, andother writings of Jewish, Christian, and Manichaean provenance can likely befound (see e.g. Wansbrough 2004; Kropp 2007; Segovia and Lourié 2012). Likewise,the earliest Islamic community is presently regarded by a growing numberof scholars as a somewhat undetermined monotheistic group that evolved froman original Jewish-Christian milieu into a distinct Muslim group perhaps muchlater than is commonly assumed and in a rather unclear way (cf. Hawting 1999;Nevo and Koren 2000; Donner 2010), or else as being originally a Christian movementcf. Van Reeth 2011b; Segovia 2015a, 2015c, 2016). Finally, the biographyof Mu

ammad has also been recently challenged due to the paucity and, oncemore, the late date and literary nature of his earliest “biographies” (see e.g. Rubin1998).

In sum, three major trends of thought define the field of early Islamic studies today: (a)the traditional Islamic view, which many non-Muslim scholars still uphold as well; (b)a number of revisionist views, which have contributed to reshaping afresh the contents, boundaries, and themes of the field itself by reframing the methodological and hermeneutical categories required in the academic study of Islamic origins; and (c)several still conservative but at the same time more cautious views that stand halfway between the traditional point of view and the revisionist views. Surveying the history of these three different approaches to the manner in which Islam irrupted in the late-antique Near East should provide the reader an introductory overview of the way in which this particular field of research has changed in the past decades. The founding of the École Spéciale des Langues Orientales Vivantes in Paris in 1795 marked the beginnings of modern Islamic studies, for it was under the school’s second director, Antoine Isaac Silvestre de Sacy, that the first systematiccurriculum for the teaching of Islamic languages, culture and civilisation was established in Europe. Yet the modern study of the Qur’ān began with GustavFlügel, Gustav Weil, and Theodor Nöldeke in mid-19th-century Germany. Flügelpublished the first modern edition of the Qur’ān in 1834 (which was largely useduntil the official Cairo edition appeared in 1923) and a Concordanceto its Arabictext in 1842, while Weil and Nöldeke each published, in 1844 and 1860 respectively,a critical introduction to the quranic textus receptus.Weil’s appeared in asecond edition in 1878, and Nöldeke’s, later completed by Friedrich Schwally (in1909 and 1919) and Gotthelf Bergsträsser and Otto Pretzl (in 1938), soon becamethe seminal work in the field, gaining wide, even uncontested prestige until thepresent day (see Nöldeke, Schwally, Bergsträsser, and Pretzl 2013).

As to Mu

ammad, the first modern studies were those published by Abraham Geiger in 1833, Gustav Weil in 1843, Aloys Sprenger between 1861 and 1869, William Muir between 1858 and 1894, and again Nöldeke in 1863. Geiger’s pioneering essay on Mu

ammad’s life and Weil’s study of the biblical legends known to the early Muslims (1845) were also the first books to explore a number of possible early Islamic borrowings from Judaism, while apparent Christian influences – on which a few authors such as Ignaz Goldziher and Henry Preserved Smith had already provided some useful insights – were first systematically explored by Carl Heinrich Becker in 1907. Yet modern scholarship on the beginnings of Islam is likewise indebted to the groun dbreaking works of Goldziher, whose MuhammedanischeStudien,published between 1889 and 1890, represented a first, successful, and in many ways still valid attempt to examine the making and early development of Islamic identity against its complex, in fact liminal religious setting.

For the most part, however, and notwithstanding their intrinsic value, these early studies – save those of Geiger and especially Goldziher, which were unconventional in both their approach and conclusions – tended to subscribe to, and thus validate, the traditional master narrative of Islam’s origins. This is particularly noticeable in the case of Nöldeke, whose chronology of the quranic text largely follows the traditional Muslim chronology, and whose approach to the Qur’ān as a single-authored unitary document is anything but convincing to a postmodern mentality. Yet as Stephen Shoemaker rightly recalls (2012: 124–6), had studied with, and was indeed the foremost disciple of, Heinrich Ewald, a conservative German theologian and orientalist who opposed the new critical methods essayed by Ferdinand-Christian Baur and the Tübingen School in the neighbouring field of early Christian studies. In Ewald’s view, all that a scholar of early Islam was expected to do was to learn as much Arabic as s/he could and willingly accept the traditional account of the rise of Islam, whose veracity, therefore, ought not to be questioned. Supported by Nöldeke and his followers, this view rapidly became mainstream and has been prevalent in the field—with only a very few exceptions— ever since.

Other likewise prominent works published in the late-19th century and the first half of the 20th century (up to the late 1950s) include those of Hartwig Hirschfeld (1878, 1886, 1902), William Muir (1878, 1896), Charles Cutler Torrey (1892), William St Clair Tisdall (1905), Leone Caetani (1905–26), Israel Schapiro (1907), Paul Casanova (1911–24), Lazarus Goldschmidt (1916), Goldziher (1920), Wilhelm Rudolph (1922), Josef Horovitz (1926), Heinrich Speyer (1931), David Sidersky (1933), Anton Spitaler (1935), Richard Bell (1937–9), Arthur Jeffery (1937, 1938 [see now Jeffery 2007]), Régis Blachère (1947, 1949–50, 1957), and Thomas O’Shaughnessy (1948) on the Qur’ān; Karl Vollers (1906) and Alphonse Mingana (1933–9) on ancient Arabic language and manuscripts; David Samuel Margoliouth (1905, 1914), Arent Jan Wensinck (1908, 1928, 1932), Caetani (1910), HenriLammens (1912, 1914, 1924, 1928), Bell (1926), Tor Andrae (1926, 1932), Blachère (1952), and William Montgomery Watt (1953, 1956) on Mu

ammad, the early history of Islam, and early Muslim dogma; Alfred Guillaume (1924) and Wensinck (1927) on the early Islamic traditions; Joseph Schacht (1950) on the making of Islamic law; and Samuel Marinus Zwemer (1012), Wilhelm Rudolph (1922), Margoliouth (1924), Heinrich Speyer (1931), Torrey (1933), Haim Zeev (Joachim Wilhelm) Hirschberg (1939), Abraham Katsch (1954), Solomon Goiten (1955), and Denise Masson (1958) on early Jewish-Christian-Muslim relations. Among the major arguments, discussions, and controversies put forward in this period, the interpretation of emergent Islam as an heretical offshoot of Christianity (Lammens),the textual discrepancies between the old codices of the Qur’ān and its foreign vocabulary (Jeffery), and the representation of Mu

ammad as either a statesman (Watt) or an apocalyptic prophet (Casanova) deserve special mention.

In the second half of the 20th century, growing attention was paid to the situation of the Arabian Peninsula on the eve of Islam and the archaeological witnesses available to us; the information supposedly gathered together by the early Muslim authors regarding the dawn of Islam and the different types of literature that they produced; the biography of Mu

ammad and his polemics against both Jews and Christians; the language, structure, contents, message, and apparent Jewish and Christian subtexts of the Qur’ān, as well as its competing interpretactive traditions; the formation of the Islamic state and the clash between different Muslim groups in the first centuries of Islamic rule; and both the non-Muslimviews of Islam and the relation between Jews, Christians, and Muslims in the first Islamic centuries. Especially noteworthy were the works by François Déroche and Sergio Noja (1998`g x2013;2001) on the early quranic manuscripts; Günter Lüling (1974),John Burton (1977), John Wansbrough (1977), Neal Robinson (1996), Stefan Wild (1996), and Andrew Rippin (1999) on the quranic corpus, its collection, function, style, contents, and presumably encrypted texts; Cornelis Versteegh (1993) on Arabic grammar and early quranic exegesis; Andrew Rippin (1988), Claude Gilliot (1990), and Marjo Buitelaar and Harald Motzki (1993) on the latter; Toshihiko Izutsu (1959) on quranic semantics; Helmut Gätjie (1971), Fazlur Rahman (1980), O’Shaughnessy (1969, 1985), and Jacques Berque (1993) on the teachings of the Qur’ān; Jacques Jomier (1959), Heikki Räisänen (1972), and Roberto Tottoli (1999) on the analogies and differences between several themes in the Bible and the Qur’ān; Youakim Moubarac (1998) and Reuven Firestone (1990) on the evolution of the Abraham-Ishmael legends in early Islam; David Thomas (1992), Steven Wasserstrom (1995), Camila Adang (1996), Michael Lecker (1998), and Uri Rubin (1999) on early Jewish-Christian-Muslim relations; Räisänen (1971) and Jane Dammen McAuliffe (1991) on the quranic image of Jesus and Christianity; Maxime Rodinson (1961), Watt (1961), Roger Arnaldez (1970), Noja (1974), Michael Cook (1983), Martin Lings (1983), Gordon Newby (1989), Francis Peters (1994), Rubin (1995, 1998), Marco Schöller (1998), and David Marshall (1999) on Mu

ammad and his early biographies; Meir Kister (1980, 1990), and Shmuel Ahituv and Eliezer Oren (1998) on pre-Islamic Arabia and the rise of Islam; Schacht (1964), Albrecht Noth (1973), Wansbrough (1978), Gautier Juynboll (1983, 1996), Motzki (1991), and Fred Donner (1998) on the early Islamic traditions and literature; Watt (1973), Cook (1981), and Mohammad Ali Amir-Moezzi (1992) on the formative period of Islamic thought and early Islamic sectarianism; Patricia Crone (with Michael Cook and Martin Hinds, 1977, 1980, 1986, 1987a, 1987b), Donner (1981), Suliman Bashear (1984), Gerald Hawting (1986, 1999), Hamid Dabashi (1989), Garth Fowden (1993), Wilferd Madelung (1997), and Firestone (1999) on the rise of Islam and early Islamic history; and Bashear (1997) and Robert Hoyland (1997) on the early non-Muslim views of Islam.

A number of these studies (e.g., those of Schacht, Lüling, Wansbrough, Crone, Cook, Bashear, Hawting, Rippin, and Rubin) nonetheless adopted a highly critical view of the ‘data’ transmitted in the early Islamic sources about the economy and politics of 7th-century Arabia, the rise and early development of Islam, the alleged biography of Mu

ammad, and the elaboration, collection, and later canonisation of the Qur’ān. Drawing partly on Goldziher, Schacht questioned the historicity of the Ḥadīṯ collections. Lüling attempted to reconstruct the textual materialslater reworked into the Qur’ān and suggested that they were Christian liturgical texts. Wansbrough analysed both the Qur’ān and the earliest Islamic writings about the rise of Islam with the tools of biblical criticism and concluded that if the former ought to be regarded as a collection of originally independent texts, which were later unified by means of certain rhetorical conventions, about whose origin and function we know almost nothing, then the earliest Islamic sources should likewise be envisaged as elaborated literary reports that tell us more about their authors’ concerns than about how things really took place – a point of view shared by Rubin in spite of his more traditional curriculum. For their part, Crone and Cook analysed the way in which such purely literary sources re-presented the rise of Islam and its historical and geographic background by reviewing the non-Muslim documents contemporary with the emergence and early expansion of Islam, in addition to which they also studied the plausibly limited role played by the Arabian Peninsula along the trade routes of the late-antique Near East, which led them to cast doubts on the apparent causes that coalesced to make possible the rise of Islam. Bashear also rejected the traditional account of Islam’s origins and ventured a new interpretation, according to which Islam gradually arose from within a Jewish-Christian context – a thesis that was independently developed by Hawting, a pupil of Wansbrough, who later focused his research on the first centuries of Islamic rule. Another of Wansbrough’s disciples, Rippin, undertook the task of scrutinising the beginnings of quranic exegesis.

Accustomed to looking at things through the lens of the Muslim tradition, many scho...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Table of Contents
• Abbreviations
• List of Tables
• Foreword and Acknowledgements
• Chapter 1/Introduction: The Quranic Noah and the Re-mapping of Early Islamic Studies
• Chapter 2/Tracing the Apocalyptic Noah in Pre-Islamic Jewish and Christian Literature
• Chapter 3/Noah in the Qur’ān: An Overview
• Chapter 4/The Quranic Noah Narratives: Form, Content, Context, and Primary Meaning
• Chapter 5/Reading Between the Lines: The Quranic Noah Narratives as Witnesses to the Life of the Quranic Prophet?
• Chapter 7/Reading Forward: From the Quranic Noah to the Muhammadan Evangelium
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index of Ancient Writings
• Index of Ancient and Modern Authors