Nor, it seems, was he wholly oblivious to the fact. On one level, it is true, the Qur’an records a very specific moment in history: a moment that internal evidence, as well as tradition, identifies with the early decades of the seventh Christian century. Muhammad, in his concern to define for the Believers the troublesome border zone that separated them from the Jews and the Christians, was perfectly capable of doing so in a manner that any pious Caesar would have recognised. Just as Justinian had prescribed swingeing financial penalties for “all those who do not rightly worship God,”43 so was it decreed in the Qur’an that Jews and Christians should pay a special tithe, the jizya—and in such a manner as to render their inferiority manifest to all.44 Taxation combined with triumphalism: here was bullying in the grand tradition of the Roman state. That it was Christians who now faced fiscal penalties for belonging to a superseded faith, rather than imposing the fines themselves, only compounded the irony, of course. The Prophet, insofar as he did care to offer specific policy recommendations to his followers on the patrolling of religious diversity, was very much a man of his age.
And yet, in truth, his gaze was only partially fixed upon the present. In the Qur’an, the pretensions of the Jews and Christians are presumed to be something timeless. As with great empires, so with great religions: the precise parabola of their evolution was as nothing to the Prophet. The stirring events that had shaped the imperial Church no more intruded upon his consciousness than did the wars of the Caesars. Of the great councils, of the anguished disagreements between Chalcedonians and Monophysites, of all those emperors, bishops and saints who, over the centuries, had struggled with such passion and such earnestness to arrive at a consensus as to the nature of Christ—of these, in the Qur’an, there is not so much as a hint. In fact, there are no Christians at all in its pages that the contemporary Church would have acknowledged as its own, save for the monks of the desert—and even these are so shadowy a presence that the Prophet can never quite decide whether to laud them as models of humility or condemn them as monsters of greed.45 So, when Muhammad spoke of Christians, whom did he have in mind? A clue, perhaps, lies in the unexpected word he uses to describe them: Nasara. The name would have meant very little to the vast majority of seventh-century Christians. Only the learned—scholars familiar with the works of Jerome and Epiphanius, perhaps—might have pricked up their ears. The Nazoreans—those curious heretics who held to the Law of Moses and believed that the Holy Spirit was Christ’s mother—had long since vanished from their ancient Palestinian heartland. Yet, in the Qur’an—composed a full two centuries after Jerome had noted the Nazoreans as a mere fading curiosity—not only is their name used by the Prophet as shorthand for all the “People of the Gospel,”46 but their doctrines provoke some of his bitterest contempt. “ ‘Did you really say to people,’ ” God is shown asking of Jesus, “ ‘Take me and my mother as two gods, instead of God?’ ”47 An indignant Jesus volubly protests his innocence. As well he might have done—for the charge being laid against him was the mortal charge of shirk.
Now, it is true, of course, that the Qur’an was labouring here under an almost grotesque misapprehension: orthodox Christians, despite what the Nazoreans may have believed, had absolutely no notion of any “God the Mother.” Nevertheless, the Prophet had not wholly got the wrong end of the stick. By accusing the Christians of shirk, he had ripped the bandage off a very ancient sore. For six hundred years, the issue of how the relationship between God and Jesus was properly to be defined had been an itch that few Christians had been able to leave alone. For half of this span, admittedly, ever since the Council of Nicaea, it had pleased the leaders of the Catholic Church to imagine that there did exist a definitive answer to the problem, approved by Caesar, and sanctioned by the heavens. In reality, of course, as the Arian loyalties of the Ostrogoths and Vandals had shockingly served to demonstrate, the garden of Christian orthodoxy had never been totally cleared of weeds. A heresy, if it could manage to put down roots beyond the reach of the imperial Church, might still enjoy a certain, late-flourishing bloom. What, then, to make of the references in the Qur’an to the mysterious Nasara? That Arianism had long been able to prosper amid the bogs and forests of the North suggests that the Nazoreans might very plausibly have endured in the deserts of the South. The implications of this, nevertheless, are more than a little disorienting. The origins of the Nazoreans, after all, stretched far beyond the time of Jerome—right back to the origins of the Christian Church. The questions posed by their doctrines struck at the heart of what Christianity, in the wake of Nicaea, had evolved to become. What, precisely, did it mean to say that Jesus was the Son of God? How might the Trinity best be defined and explained? Were Jews and Christians doomed to eternal mutual hatred, or were they better regarded as children of the same book?
Certainly, if the Nasara are indeed to be equated with the Nazoreans, then it might help to explain why the Qur’an, despite clearly having attained something like its final form early in the seventh Christian century, should seem haunted as well by the whispers of some very ancient ghosts. The one-sided debate to be found in its pages on the nature of Christ—one which firmly rejects the Trinity and affirms that Jesus himself was only ever a man—has a breath about it that seems to rise from an eerily distant age. Older than Nicaea, let alone Chalcedon, it had raged most bitterly back when there was no single Church, merely a multiplicity of sects. “They killed him not,” the Prophet declares, “nor did they crucify him, but so it was made to appear to them.”48 Such a notion had not been heard for many centuries. What was it, after all, if not the very argument of the long-scotched Gospel of Basilides?