The voice we hear is not necessarily that of Basilides himself, of course. Nevertheless, the echoes of long-muted Christian heretics—of Gnostics and Nazoreans—are sufficiently loud in the Qur’an to make one wonder from where, if not from God, they might possibly have come. This issue is rendered all the more haunting because vanished gospels are not the only traces of an often fabulously distant past to be found in the verses of the holy text. Like a mighty cliff-face compounded of different layers of sediment, in which, just occasionally, fossils are to be glimpsed, exposed by rock-falls and weathering, the Qur’an hints at entire aeons that have been and gone, and yet endure contained within itself. Many of these same hints, not surprisingly, have always been regarded by commentators as somewhat of a puzzle. Just as fossils, prior to a proper understanding of the earth’s geology, provoked many a furrowed brow among those who found them, there are phrases and even entire passages in the Qur’an that have always perplexed the learned. What, for instance, might one make of a short sura that takes as its theme the punishment of wrongdoers known as “the People of the Trench”?49 Over the course of the centuries, numerous attempts have been made to explain this enigmatic phrase. Perhaps, so one early scholar suggested, it referred to the servants of a king who fired Abraham into a burning trench by means of a catapult. Or perhaps it related to the atrocities perpetrated by Yusuf against the Christians of Najran.50 But what if it were not original to the Qur’an at all, but derived instead from another written source—specifically, one of those mysterious, ancient Jewish texts that occasionally cropped up in the wilds of the desert beyond Jerusalem in late antiquity? The discovery in more recent times of an entire cache of such manuscripts—the so-called “Dead Sea Scrolls”—has led a number of scholars to suspect a link between their teachings and those of the Qur’an.51 What should be a designation for hell in the Dead Sea Scrolls, for instance, if not “the Trench”? And what should be the fate of the damned on the Day of Judgement if not to be consigned to that Trench’s fires? Could this, then, be a possible source for the mysterious and much-debated phrase in the Qur’an—a vision of the End Days preserved from a distant Jewish past?
Certainly, it is notable, throughout the course of his revelations, that the Prophet returns again and again to a notion that few of his contemporaries in either synagogue or monastery would have thought to dispute: that the will of God can indeed be fathomed through the written word.
With Him are the keys of the Unseen; none but He has knowledge thereof.
He knows all that is on land and on sea;
Not a leaf falls but He knows it.
Not a seed in the darkness of earth,
Not anything, fresh or dried,
But it is inscribed in a Manifest Book.
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This, rather in the manner of the Talmud, is to cast the whole of creation as a scripture; but elsewhere, the Prophet is more explicit in his praise of the truths to be found in “ancient scrolls.” By these, he hurriedly goes on to specify, he means “the scrolls of Abraham and Moses”53—and yet the sheer wealth of allusions, echoes and remembrances in the Qur’an, enriching it and yet never overwhelming it, drawn from a bewilderingly eclectic array of sources, and yet made triumphantly, inimitably its own, serves to suggest that Abraham and Moses were not, perhaps, alone in having influenced the Prophet. From the propaganda of Roman emperors to tales of Christian saints, from long-vanished Gnostic gospels to ancient Jewish tracts: traces of all these writings have been convincingly identified in the Qur’an. Just as Muhammad claimed to be the Seal of the Prophets, so did his revelations contain within themselves, as a revenant and spectral presence, hints of how other peoples, back in the often distant past, had similarly had experience of the divine. Even gods that were ancient when Alexander was born are not wholly absent from its pages: for what are the horns that Dhu’l Qarnayn sports, after all, if not the ram horns of Amun? Some would go further yet, and claim that the very visions of paradise contained within the Qur’an, complete with eternally boyish cup-bearers, handsome “like hidden pearls,”54 who are bestowed upon the Believers when they ascend to heaven, and beauteous, “wide-eyed maidens,”55 shimmer with the primordial glamour of the banished gods of Greece and Rome. Certainly, it would seem a striking coincidence otherwise that Zeus, the pagan Lord of Olympus, should have had as his cup-bearer an exquisitely pearl-like youth and that his queen, Hera, the goddess of marital bliss, should have been famed for her seductively large eyes. Muslim scholars would certainly find themselves both perplexed and unsettled by the Prophet’s insistence that celestial maidens had “wide eyes,” believing it a description better suited to cows. Their twitchiness would hardly have been improved if they had known that Hera, in the poetry of the pagan Greeks, was invariably hailed as “ox-eyed.”56 The Olympians might have been long toppled from their thrones—and yet, in the pages of the Qur’an, the golden halls of their palace still blaze with a brilliant after-glow.
Yet if this is the case, and if the revelations of the Prophet do draw for at least some of their power upon visions of the sacred that elsewhere, in the Christian empire of the Romans, had long since been driven underground, then the mystery of their origins seems only to deepen. Even more far-fetched than the portrait of Mecca as a bustling city of merchant princes, after all, is any likelihood that it might once have been teeming with Gnostics, Roman propagandists and enthusiasts for Homer and Virgil. Yet if the Qur’an, with all its rich and haunting sophistication, did not originate in Mecca, then from where did it come?
If we are to attempt an answer to that question, there is only one place to look: within the pages of the Qur’an itself.
Where?
Muhammad is most unlikely to have realised it, but his claim to be setting a seal on the revelations of earlier prophets was not, in fact, original to him.57 “Wisdom and deeds have always from time to time been brought to mankind by the messengers of God.”58 So it had been declared, some three and a half centuries prior to the composition of the Qur’an, by a man who had aspired, and with great self-consciousness, to write the ultimate in holy books.
Mani, more than anyone before him, positively revelled in the blending of rival faiths. Born near Ctesiphon in 216, shortly before the city fell to Ardashir, he grew up within a Christian sect that, just like the Nazoreans, practised circumcision, held the Holy Spirit to be female, and prayed in the direction of Jerusalem. Such an upbringing clearly imbued in Mani a pronounced taste for the multicultural by 240, when he appeared before the newly crowned Shapur I, he had already successfully fused Jewish, Christian and Zoroastrian teachings into a spectacular new whole, while also claiming, just for good measure, to be the heir of the Buddha. Although Shapur himself, while intrigued by Mani’s teachings, had failed to be converted by them, the self-proclaimed prophet’s disciples spread to the limits of West and East and fashioned out of their master’s teachings an authentically global faith. From Carthage to China, there had come to exist cells of Manichaeans “in every country and in every language.”59 They were even to be found, it may be, in Arabia: for the “Sabaeans,” a mysterious people who feature in the Qur’an alongside the Jews and Christians as one of the three “Peoples of the Book,” were, so it has plausibly been argued, none other than Manichaeans.60