In fact, it might mean just the opposite. Long before the coming of Islam, scholars labouring over other works of scripture had inadvertently demonstrated an unsettling truth: the greater the sense of awe with which a text was regarded, the more complete might be the amnesia as to the original circumstances of its composition. Back in the Iranshahr of Peroz, the Zoroastrian priests, resolved as they were to adapt their inheritance of ancient scriptures to the political requirements of their Church, had shown not the slightest hesitation in shifting the birthplace of Zoroaster to Media. The Talmud, of course, was nothing if not a project to demonstrate that Moses would have been perfectly at home in the yeshivas of Sura and Tiberias. Christian scholars, keen to establish the primal antiquity of their own faith, wrote whole reams of commentaries on the Tanakh, proving that what they termed the “Old Testament” was in fact a foreshadowing of Christ. If adherents of the evolving religion of Islam, confronted by a scripture of indubitable holiness, but rife all the same with passages that they could barely understand, did set themselves to the elucidation of its mysteries, not as historians but rather as men concerned to comprehend the workings of God, then they would have been doing nothing that mowbeds, or rabbis, or bishops had not already set themselves to achieve.
To establish when the Qur’an might have been composed, therefore, and whether it does indeed provide us with an authentic source for the Prophet’s life and times, it is essential first to strip away the great cladding of commentary that has been woven tightly around the holy text since the early ninth century, and make an attempt, at the very least, to see it naked and unadorned. This is no easy task, however. The same ambiguities that prompted Muslim scholars to compose their immense array of commentaries and biographies of the Prophet still render it challenging, to put it mildly, to read the Qur’an in the light of the Qur’an alone. Unlike the Bible, which name-checks any number of conveniently datable rulers—from Cyrus to Augustus—the Qur’an betrays what is, to any historian, a most regrettable lack of interest in geopolitics. Those who are named in its pages tend to be angels, demons or prophets. There are the four mentions of Muhammad himself, of course. Then there is an enigmatic figure called Zayd, who seems to be both the ex-husband of one of the Prophet’s wives and his adopted son: tradition would subsequently identify him as a one-time slave who died in battle as an early martyr for Islam. Finally, there is an unbeliever by the name of Abu Lahab, who appears in the biographies of the Prophet as his uncle, and who is condemned, together with his wife, to “burn in the Flaming Fire.”24 No other contemporaries of Muhammad are mentioned by name in the holy text. The focus of the Qur’an is fixed implacably, not on the personal, but on the divine. Before the awful dimension of such a radiance, in which God’s omnipotence can be experienced as something both intimate and cosmic, as a presence that is simultaneously closer to the believer than his own “jugular vein”25 and more remote than the most distant star in the universe, what is any mere mortal? The voices that feature in the Qur’an are those of God Himself and His prophet: no one else gets much of a hearing.
Which is not to say that there is no sense of dialogue in the Qur’an—for in truth it is a most disputatious book. Always, however, those who are being variously scorned, chided and refuted by the Prophet lurk off-stage—their voices unheard, their beliefs unaired. Mushrikun, they are called—“those who are guilty of shirk.” Such an offence—the belief that supernatural beings might be partnered with God as fit objects of worship—would end up enshrined by Islam as the most unforgivable of sins, of course; and so perhaps it is no surprise that the presumption should have grown up among Muslim scholars that the Mushrikun had been rank idolators and pagans, worshippers of stock and stone. This, however, is not at all what the Qur’an itself implies.26 Indeed, based purely on the evidence contained in the holy text, the Mushrikun seem to have shared a whole range of beliefs with Jews and Christians—not to mention the Prophet himself. That the world was created by a single god; that this god would listen to those who approached him, whether through prayer or pilgrimage; that he ruled as lord of the angels: all this, it is clear enough, was common ground between Muhammad and his opponents. So too was familiarity with characters from the Bible—something taken wholly for granted in the Qur’an. Where the Mushrikun erred, however, according to the Prophet, was in their adherence to a truly shocking notion: that God had fathered the angels, and would listen to any prayers that might be raised to Him through their agency. Even worse, in a world where no man ever doubted his superiority over women, the Mushrikun actually presumed “to turn the angels, servants of the All-Merciful, into females”!27
Whether this was actually what the Mushrikun had done is, of course, a rather different matter. “They follow nothing, those who worship partners apart from God—they follow nothing but conjecture; they utter nothing but lies.”28 Hardly, it is fair to say, the most nuanced cataloguing of what the Mushrikun might actually have believed. The Prophet was clearly no encyclopedist: he lacked the insatiable passion of an Epiphanius for cataloguing the precise details of his opponents’ follies. Whoever or whatever the Mushrikun may have been, it is impossible to glimpse them save through a swirling fog-bank of polemic. Certainly, there is nothing in the mere fact of their existence that helps us to pinpoint when they flourished.
It is fortunate, then, that the Qur’an does not float entirely free of history’s moorings. Among its 114 chapters—or “suras”—there are just a few scattered clues to its likeliest date of composition. Of one thing, at least, we can be certain: its final form long post-dates the implosion of the Thamud, that large confederation of Arab tribes employed by the Romans, and who are commemorated by the Prophet as the exemplification of worldly greatness brought low. Time was, he reminds their ghosts, when God “granted you mastery over the earth, when you seized its plains to build your mansions, and carved houses from the mountains”29—until, as payback for straying off the straight and narrow, they were dispatched by a scream so terrible that it left them withered, like dry straw. If this name-checking of the Thamud appears to imply a certain familiarity on the part of the Prophet with the workings of Roman imperialism, then it is dramatically confirmed by another verse—the only one in the entire Qur’an to name a contemporary power. “The Romans,” it is reported, “have been defeated in a nearby land, and yet, after their defeat, they shall be victorious—in a few years.”30 It is hard to know to what this might conceivably be alluding, if not the loss of Palestine to Khusrow II. The prophecy might appear brief, and almost throwaway—but its implications are momentous. So terrible was the great war between Persia and the New Rome, and so devastating its impact, that even in the very throne-room of the heavens its reverberations were being felt. No other earthly conflict, after all, had served to prompt a long-range forecast from the Lord of Worlds Himself.