So how is it, in a book supposedly composed there in Muhammad’s lifetime, that the monotheisms of the far-distant Fertile Crescent should have been given such a starring role? It is all very mysterious; and made even more so by the fact that Mecca is not alone in seeming to have had a spectrally low profile in the early decades of the Arab Empire. So too did the Qur’an itself. As with the reputed birthplace of the Prophet, so with the compendium of his revelations: there is not a single mention of it in writings of the period. In the first flush of the Ishmaelite takeover, the Patriarch of Antioch assumed that his new masters’ holy book was the Torah.17 Such a presumption, of course, might well have reflected nothing more than wilful blindness—except that it was far from being confined to bishops. More than a century after the death of Muhammad, Muslims—as they were now starting to call themselves—might betray a very similar ignorance. Even as Christian bureaucrats, tracking the peculiar beliefs of their Arab overlords, began to note the existence of various “frivolous tales”18 composed by Muhammad, Muslim scholars, in their concern to identify precisely what the Prophet might have taught, were still perfectly capable of overlooking the Qur’an altogether. How, for instance, did God wish adulterers to be punished? To this question, hadith after hadith provided the same unyielding answer as was to be found in the Torah: He wished them to be stoned. Yet this was not at all what was taught in the Qur’an. There, it could be read that God, “ever-compassionate,” merely wished adulterers to be given “a hundred lashes.”19 How to explain such a discrepancy? If the Qur’an truly originated in the lifetime of Muhammad, and had been preserved and cherished by his followers ever since as the unchanging word of God, why was it that so many Muslim jurists—and prominent ones at that—had disregarded it as a source for their rulings? The mystery seems only compounded by the complete absence of any commentaries on the Qur’an prior to the ninth Christian century, and by the fact that even then different communities of the faithful preserved different versions of the holy text.aPerhaps it is hardly surprising, then, that many a scholar today, confronted by the dogma which teaches that the Qur’an derives unaltered and immaculate from the lifetime of Muhammad, should be tempted to raise an eyebrow, at the very least.
How far is such scepticism justified? Much, of course, hangs on the answer. Nothing better illustrates the extreme sensitivity of the issues at stake than the fate of a cache of Qur’ans that were found some forty years ago in Sana’a—capital of what was once the Jewish Kingdom of Himyar and is now the Muslim Republic of Yemen. Uncovered by workmen in the ceiling of the city’s oldest mosque, stuffed into seventeen rough hessian sacks and preserved from oblivion only by the sharp eyes of the Yemeni antiquities chief, the great mass of parchment contained fragments of what are almost certainly the oldest Qur’ans in existence. Four decades on from their discovery, however, these precious manuscripts remain shrouded in mystery. Only two researchers, both German, have been permitted to study them. When one of these, an expert in Arabic palaeography by the name of Gerd-Rüdiger Puin, publicly asserted that the fragments demonstrated that the Qur’an, no less than the Bible, had evolved over time and was a veritable “cocktail of texts,”20 the Yemeni authorities reacted with fury. To this day, the Qur’anic fragments in Sana’a remain unpublished—nor have any further Western scholars been permitted to study them. As a result, their true significance remains opaque.
But not wholly so. Granted that Puin’s researches do indeed seem to suggest that words, spellings and even the order of verses in the Qur’an were perfectly capable of being misread and miscopied, it is apparent as well that these alterations were only ever involuntary errors. There is not a hint of deliberate fabrication in any of the Sana’a fragments. Phrases may vary substantially from manuscript to manuscript, but entire passages never do. At no point, it seems, was the Qur’an ever the equivalent of a collection of hadiths—something to be added to upon the whim of some Caliph or scholar. In fact, nothing better testifies to the dread and reverence with which every last word of it, every last letter, was patently regarded than the fact that jurists were prepared to swallow even a glaring embarrassment such as its ruling on adultery. Wriggle though they might—with some claiming that stoning was actually prescribed in the Qur’an as the original penalty for the offence, but that the relevant verse had been devoured by a hungry goat—no attempt was ever made to improvise something new. Even the earliest Sana’a fragments reveal an awed sense on the part of those responsible for them that something of profound and terrible holiness was being put to paper, far transcending human invention. If, as both Puin and his colleague have argued, these earliest fragments are to be dated to the beginning of the eighth century, it would suggest that their ultimate origins must lie well before that time.21 The daring thesis floated some decades back, by a few venturesome scholars, that the Qur’an might have been the product of protracted evolution, and that it arrived at something like its current state only at the end of the eighth Christian century, seems to have been conclusively disproved.22 Irrespective of all the revisions and variations Puin has traced in the Sana’a fragments, the bedrock of the Qur’an appears hewn out of solid granite.
This, however, begs any number of questions in turn. How was it that a book so revered should simultaneously have been neglected for so long by so many Muslim jurists? What, precisely, was the prehistory of the Qur’an prior to its first appearance in the written record in the early eighth century? Does the fact that every man who ever copied it appears to have done so in the unshakable conviction that he was transcribing words of unparalleled holiness mean that we can trust the Muslim traditions that explain how it came into being, after all? Perhaps. But a familiar problem, like a nagging headache, persists. It remains the case, and disconcertingly so, that the earliest surviving biographies of the Prophet were written whole generations after his death—and that their accounts of the origins of the Qur’an are such as cannot possibly be taken for granted. Just how yawning, then, just how much of a rupture, might the gap between the traditional date of the holy book’s composition and the first commentaries on it actually have been? The Qur’an, as it disarmingly acknowledges in one of its own verses, contains no lack of “ambiguous”23 materiaclass="underline" there are contradictions, abrupt shifts in voice, topic and tone, and baffling allusions. That brilliant intellects, from the ninth century onwards, should have devoted themselves to the immense task of clarifying these same ambiguities does not necessarily mean that they had inherited authentic information as to what the holy text had originally meant.