“The believers were done a favour,” so the Qur’an informed its readers, “when God sent among them a messenger, of their number, reciting to them His verses, purifying them and teaching them the Book and Wisdom, when before they had been in manifest error.”32 Here, in this ringing assertion, lay the very essence of how the Muslim people saw the origins of their faith. Origins that were to be interpreted not merely as a matter of historical record, but as indubitable and irrefutable proof of the shaping hand of God Himself.
Airy Nothings
It was hardly surprising that the great labour of fashioning the Sunna took Muslim scholars so long. Such was the compendious quantity of sayings attributed to the Prophet that only in the eleventh Christian century, some four hundred years after his death, could jurists plausibly claim to have bagged the lot. Even then, however, they could not relax. An even greater challenge awaited them: defining precisely what it was that God, speaking through His Prophet, had bestowed upon the Muslim people. Naturally, fathoming the purposes of an omnipotent and omniscient deity was no simple matter. As one ninth-century scholar, in a tone of awed defeatism, had put it: “Imagination does not reach Him, and thinking does not comprehend Him.”33 In the event, it would take six hundred long years of bitter and occasionally murderous argument before scholars of the Sunna could finally be brought to agree on the nature of the Qur’an: that it was eternal, not created, and divine, not a reflection of God. There were certain problems altogether too critical, too sensitive, too awkward to be rushed.
Muslim theologians were not the first to wrestle with the implications of this. Long before the words of God manifested themselves in the mouth of Muhammad, Christians too had struggled to explain how a deity who transcended time and space might conceivably have descended from heaven to earth. That they identified this intrusion of the divine into the realm of the mortal with a person rather than a book had done nothing to lessen the challenge. Indeed, Christians had wrangled over the nature of Christ for quite as long as Muslim scholars would go on to debate the nature of the Qur’an. Admittedly, in the early years of the Christian faith, these arguments had hardly been such as to disturb the councils of nations; but during late antiquity, when emperors and kings started to wrestle with them too, whole empires were transformed by the arcana of such debates. Just as the civilisation of Islam would be transfigured by the musings of philosophers, so would Christendom. East and west, much of the world was destined to bear witness to what had been, perhaps, the most startling discovery of late antiquity: that pondering how God might have manifested Himself on earth could serve to transform the way entire peoples behaved and thought.
Nevertheless, while Muslims and Christians faced very similar knots, their respective attempts to unravel these set them on radically different courses. Clearly, if God were to be identified with words in a book, then those words were bound to defy all attempts at rational analysis. Even to contemplate such a project was blasphemy. Devout Muslims were no more likely to question the origins of the Qur’an than devout Christians were to start ransacking Jerusalem for the skeleton of a man with holes in his hands and feet. This was because the nearest Christian analogy to the role played in Islam by the Prophet’s revelations was not the Bible but Jesus—the Son of God. The record of Christ’s life, for all that it lay at the heart of the Christian faith, was not considered divine—unlike Christ Himself. Although Christians certainly believed it to be the word of God, they also knew that it had been mediated through eminently fallible mortals. Not only were there four different accounts of Christ’s life in the Bible, but it contained as well a whole host of other books, written over a vast expanse of time, and positively demanding to be sifted, compared and weighed the one against the other. As a result, the contextualising of ancient texts came to be second nature to scholars of the Bible, and the skills required to attempt it hard-wired into the Christian brain.
And in due course, into brains that were barely Christian at all. By the eighteenth century, the Church had long ceased to hold the monopoly on subjecting its holy texts to scholarly enquiry. The model of history promoted by Eusebius—which traced in the past the working of the purposes of God—had started to devour itself. In his massive account of the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, the English historian Edward Gibbon subjected some of the most venerated compositions of late antiquity to a pathologist’s scalpeclass="underline" “The only defect of these pleasing compositions is the want of truth and common sense.”34 So he dismissed, with his customary solemn sneer, the writings of one prominent saint. Yet his tone of irony was to prove a mere presentiment of the far more naked scepticism that would increasingly, from the nineteenth century onwards, see almost every tenet of the Christian faith subjected to the most merciless dissection. The shock, to a still devout European public, was seismic. In 1863, when a lapsed seminarian by the name of Ernest Renan presumed to publish a biography of Jesus that treated its subject not as a god, but as a man like any other, it was condemned in horrified terms by one critic as nothing less than a “new crucifixion of Our Lord.”35 The book promptly became a runaway bestseller. Scandalous it may have been, but the European public, it appeared, was not entirely averse to being scandalised.
Of course, it was not only the life of Christ that was being put under the microscope. Four years before the publication of Renan’s tome, Charles Darwin had brought out his epochal study On the Origin of Species—with devastating implications for any notion that the biblical account of the Creation might somehow embody a literal truth. The genie of scepticism was now well and truly out of the bottle. Time would demonstrate that there was to be no going back, in the Christian West, on the habit of subjecting to scientific enquiry what had for millennia been regarded as the sacrosanct word of God. Throughout the nineteenth century, in the hushed and sombre libraries of German theology departments, scholars would crawl and teem over the pages of the Bible, gnawing away at the sacred text like termites. Its first five books, they demonstrated, far from having been written by Moses, as had always traditionally been taught, seemed instead to have been stitched together from multiple sources.e Not only that, but these same sources had almost certainly been written centuries after the events that they purported to describe. Moses, it appeared, had been made into a mouthpiece for laws that he might very well never have pronounced—if, that was, he had even existed in the first place. Here was an unravelling of the scriptural tapestry so destructive that even some scholars themselves began to fret over the implications. “It is to suspend the beginnings of Hebrew history,” as one German theologian noted grimly, “not upon the grand creations of Moses, but upon airy nothings.”36