LECTURE NOTES

HUMANITIES CORE COURSE,

FALL QUARTER, WEEK Four

24-25 OCTOBER 2012

“Islam: The Covenant Corrected and Restored”

Quote of the Day:

“When the boy was old enough to work with his father, Abraham said, ‘My son, I have seen myself sacrificing you in a dream What do you think?’ He said, ‘Father, do as you are commanded and, God willing, you will find me steadfast.’”

Qur’an, 37:102

Five-Hundred-Year Historical Prelude:

From the Destruction of the Temple (70 CE) to the Birth of Muhammad (570 CE)

The Jews The Christians

Philo of Alexandria 20 BCE-100 CE Future New Testament canon completed;

Proto-Christianity spreads East, West, North and South: Arabic-speaking
Jewish Christians bring it back with them to Arabia from pilgrimages to
relatively near-by Jerusalem

First Jewish War,

Temple destroyed 70 CE

Council of Yavneh;

crucial moment for

Rabbinic Judaism 90 CE

ca. 125-200 Irenaeus, first Christian theologian;

Christian creeds formulated; early

Christological controversies

Rabbi Akiva,

Bar-Kokhba

the Messiah;

60 years of Roman-Jewish

war end in total Jewish defeat.

World Jewry now has

three centers 135 CE

Imperial Roman 135 CE-- Intermittent imperial persecution as gentile

suspicion; many conversion, seen as treason, accelerates

Jews move east

Mishnah completed; 200 CE

Talmuds begun

Rome at war on two 284 CE Last major persecution of

fronts, East & West; Christians begins under Diocletian

Diocletian reforms

imperial rule

306 CE Constantine founds Constantinople as

Second Rome

Christian Romans now perhaps 15-20% of

population; Christological controversies

worsen

313 CE Edict of Milan; persecution ends,

Christianity now officially tolerated

317 CE Council of Nicaea; Constantine seeks

(demands? imposes?) doctrinal unity

on Christianity

385 CE Christianity made the state religion of

the Roman Empire; Greco-Roman religion

outlawed; penalties imposed on Jews & heretics

Eastward migration

of Jews & of Christian

dissidents/heretics

results

354-430 CE Augustine of Hippo; classic Christian syn-

thesis of Greek and Jewish brought to

maturity. Bible translated into Latin.

476 CE First Rome falls

Jerusalem Talmud 476-570 CE Justinian of Constantinople recovers

complete; Babylo- Mediterranean territory from Germanic

nian Talmud invaders, then fights a series of mutually

nearing completion exhausting wars with Persia.

Different Arab tribes are mercenaries

for either side.

When Muhammad Recited, Who Was Listening?

Five original audiences:

1. traditional Arabic tribal polytheists (“disbelievers”) and, rarely,

Persian Zoroastrians

2. Arab Christians and neighboringAramaic-speaking Christians

3. Arabic-speaking local Jewish tribes

4.”Sabians”: minority monotheists in/near Arabia (non-Jewish, non-Christian)

5. Arab Muslims (“believers”); apostate Arab Muslims; rival Arab prophets

The respective special messages to each audience from Messenger Muhammad:

1. receive the message, repent of the absurdity of polytheism, or burn forever

in hell

2. receive the message, repent, admit that you know Jesus was merely human

(and that belief in the Incarnation equals polytheism) and that you have

falsified the revelation you received, or burn forever in hell

3. receive the message, repent, admit that your covenant with God had been abro-

gated because of your sins, and that you have falsified the revelation you

received, and that many of your dietary and other rules are in

error, or burn forever in hell

4. receive the message, repent, admit that the message supersedes all earlier

messages or forms of monotheism

5. having borne witness to the message, pray, give alms, make pilgrimage to

the Kaaba in Mecca to celebrate what happened there, and fast the proper

number of days (boldface terms = the later “Five Pillars of Islam”).

or, repent and return to the faith you once embraced, or burn in hell;

or, repent of your false prophecy and accept the true, or burn in hell.

I include the repeated phrase “or burn in hell” for a clear reason. The shahada or witness to faith—“There is no god but God, and Muhammad is his Messenger—that turns a non-Muslim into a Muslim is endlessly linked throughout the Qur’an to references to Judgment Day, after which there will be paradise for some and hell for others. Sura 2:26 places belief in “the Last Day” on a par with belief in God. Because so much of the Qur’an is the delivery of corrections and rebukes, references to hell are both more frequent and rather more vivid in the text than references to paradise, though the latter occur regularly as well.

How does the new scripture relate to the old—that is to the Bible?

As to its genre, the Qur’an is a long instruction to Muhammad about what he is to recite. Some of the time, it reads as if God himself is preaching to the Muslims or to mankind. Often, however, the speech is quite learly from God to Muhammad about what Muhammad is to “recite” to one or another of the audiences indicated above. God, of course, knows the Bible not as a text to be quoted, rather as a set of relationships and events that he can recall because, of course, he was a party—indeed the supremely important party—to them all. More important than any particular correction, there is the broad “reformational” claim that through Muhammad God is restoring mankind to the relationship of submission to him that Abraham modeled for the world before Moses (and Torah) and before Jesus (and Gospel) were ever written. Nothing, God tells Muhammad, that came after Abraham should ever have replaced this paradigmatic stance of submission to God as the only God. God enhances Abraham’s glory by crediting him with thinking his own way, independently, past the polytheism of his father and his nation to monotheism and the submission (islam, in Arabic) that must go with it. For Abraham, monotheism seems to have been discovery rather than revelation.

All the great names of the Bible, both Tanakh or Old Testament and the New Testament, occur in the Qur’an, but their quite different roles are all homogenized to the role of prophet receiving written scripture from God; the exceptions to that rule are mainly the female figures, notably Mary and Elizabeth. Strikingly, all the biblical figures are celebrated as models of virtue; the dark side to many of them—notably Jacob and Job—that we find in the Bible disappears. God consistently praises the great names of “the Book” and faults only “the People of the Book” for misreading and wantonly adulterating it.

Where does this broad “Abrahamic Reformation” and where do the listed more particular corrections to particular groups of listeners appear in the Qur’an?

In brief, they all appear everywhere. It has been said that all the major themes of the Qur’an will be struck in virtually any passage of one thousand words. What this means in practice is that to appreciate what how the message of the Qur’an is delivered, there is no alternative to considering it line by line, an activity that I shall begin in lecture and you will continue in sessions with your instructors.

[Open “Course Guide and Reader” to p. 114]

Historical Postlude:

How did the Qur’an come together? What was the appeal of Islam? What accounts for its phenomenal early success?

Muhammad received the revelations that are assembled in the Qur’an piecemeal from his fortieth to his sixtieth year, approximately. After Muhammad’s death in 632, leadership of the Muslim community passed in succession to three of his closest followers as caliphs or “vicars”: Abu Bakr, Umar, and Uthman. During his caliphate (644-656), Uthman assembled the authentic Suras into the collection we have, a remarkably early and consistent scriptural canonization.

As for the appeal of the Qur’an, let me offer a historical answer in terms of the five audiences listed above.

Arabs:

The northern interior of the Arabian peninsula was habitable for an Arab population of nomadic camel herder and camel-mounted traders whose home territory consisted of a series of oases but whose trade routes extended into Mesopotamia and Syria. This interior population had never been brought under either Roman or Persian imperial rule. The relatively well-watered Red Sea coast of Arabia, which the Romans called Arabia Felix or “Happy Arabia,” had long been effectively under the rule of the Roman Empire. Persian rule had extended to the Arab-populated Persian Gulf islands and parts of the Arabian coast, especially near the Tigris delta. There were also, north of Arabia proper, Arab kingdoms like that of the Nabateans , that were literate and fully integrated into the Greco-Roman political and social economy or “ecumene.” In these areas, the official Christianity of the Roman Empire and the official Zoroastrianism of the Persian Empire were well known and had significant local followings, but the mass of the Arab population did not live in these border areas. For Arabs of the central, never-conquered areas, the scriptural religions were foreign religions; the native religion was tribal polytheism, which lived on in these remote areas at a time when at least idolatrous polytheism had largely faded within the contending empires.

Meanwhile, the Arabs knew that they were a large, ancient, and potentially powerful population, some portion of which was now well trained in the military technologies of the contending Roman and Persian Empires. The appeal of a monotheism of local origin, claiming superiority to the foreign monotheisms of the Jews and Christians, and revealed with poetic power in their own language was powerful and liberating. Then, too, it was among the Arabs that the direct, clearly immensely charismatic impact of Muhammad was felt at full force. But the appeal of the Qur’an and of its critique of Judaism and Christianity was not just psychological or limited to the historical condition of the seventh-century Arabs.

Because the Qur’an delivers so scathing and protracted a critique of Christianity and Judaism, it is easy to overlook how it takes from each what had broadest appeal and dispensed with what was most problematical in each.

From Christianity, Islam takes the idea of a world religious community beginning with one nation but open in principle to all. From Judaism, it takes the idea of a strict monotheism and an elaborate, often mocking polemic against idolatry. Meanwhile, Islam repudiates Christianity’s belief in the divinity of Christ, a doctrine whose precise formulation had become violently divisive within world Christianity itself. From Judaism, Islam repudiates the notion of a privileged, permanently “chosen” people. The Qur’an freely grants that special favors were done to Israel of old, but the apostasies so unsparingly recorded in the Jewish scriptures themselves ended that special relationship (covenant), it claims. In other words, to the question of our previous class, “Is the covenant ruptured for good?” Islam answers simply “Yes.” The solution for the Jews is to recognize the authority of the new prophet of true monotheism whom God has sent to them and the Arabs simultaneously.

Christians:

Many of the dissident (officially heretical) Monophysite or Nestorian Christians, whose forms of the faith were banned and punished within the Roman Empire, stood a significant step closer to the view that Jesus was merely human than Orthodox Christianity did. For them, the warm respect accorded Jesus, Mary, and a few other New Testament figures, notably Zachary, in the Qur’an was enough to make the religious shift to Islam relatively smooth. This was particularly true, of course, because the degree of toleration extended to their form of Christianity exceeded that extended by the Roman-Christian Empire, which sometimes punished heresy with death. It is true that Christians had to pay a tax called the jizya for the privilege of remaining Christian. But Muslims had to pay required alms, called zakat, from which Christians were excused. The Roman Empire taxed everybody anyway. In monetary terms, Muslim rule was no worse than Christian.

Jews:

Starting at the time of the Babylonian exile, the Jewish religion had had Torah as a second holy “place” alongside the Temple of Jerusalem. The study of Torah had become a worshipful act comparable or greater in importance to animal sacrifice in the Temple. The notion that the Mosaic covenant could be set aside in the interest of a latter-day revival of the Abrahamic covenant through a gentile prophet was and remained completely unacceptable. However, the terms of co-existence offered to Jews by the early Muslims were easier than those offered to them by the Roman Empire. What was true for the Jews was also generally true for the Sabians and other minor forms of scriptural monotheism.

The Jews who were a powerful presence in Yathrib (later, Medina) welcomed Muhammad when he was being threatened by enemies in Mecca because, among possible other reasons, they recognized how close his monotheism was to theirs. Indeed, at the start, Muhammad seems to have seen himself as speaking to the Jews as a messenger sent to correct their religion, as the prophets of old had done, while simultaneously preaching it for the first time in their own language directly to the Arabs. This would seem to explain why prayers were initially directed toward Jerusalem rather than Mecca. The decision to shift the direction of prayer may have had, indirectly, a liberating effect on the Jews, who were now perhaps freer to be different than they were under Christianity. In a strong sense, the New Testament relies on the Tanakh to become its Old Testament and validate the unique character of Jesus the Christ, while the Qur’an unhesitatingly corrects the Tanakh into conformity with itself. To this extent, Islam “needs” the Jewish Bible less than Christianity does, this despite the Qur’an’s many, many allusions to the Bible. In other words, the more intimate relationship may have been, paradoxically, the more difficult one for world Jewry.

“Romans”:

For centuries, all subjects of the Roman Emperor had been Roman citizens, but all were by no means equally Roman in culture. The Eastern Empire itself, with Constantinople as its capital, though it referred to itself as Roman and to its language as “Romish,” spoke Greek, not Latin, and was deeply and proudly Greek in culture. At an even longer step away from the Italian Rome of Julius and August Caesar, the North African territories of the Empire were bi-lingual and significantly bi-cultural. The language of the government and of the populous intellectual and commercial classes was Greek in the Eastern, Latin in the Western Mediterranean. However, the language of the common people from the Levant across North Africa was typically a local Semitic language: Aramaic in Syria and Palestine, Coptic in Egypt, Punic in Tunis, Berber in Algeria, and so forth. Arabic is a Semitic language as well, and Arab culture in certain regards was probably closer to the local popular cultures of this half of the Roman Empire than the elite Greco-Roman and by now Christian culture was. The appeal of Islam in parts of the Roman Empire where the official Greco-Christian culture was weakest may have been enhanced by a cultural similarity to the invading Arabs. Whatever the explanation, the fact is that these areas fell quickly to the Arab Muslim invaders and never mounted any long-term resistance, while the linguistically and culturally Greek or Latin areas either held out against the Arabs or immediately, as in Northern Spain, developed dogged, long-term resistance movements.

The fact that the Roman Empire was already, in its own eyes, overwhelmingly monotheistic (indeed, polytheism was illegal in the Empire), one might have expected the appeal of Islamic monotheism to be limited to the interior of the Arabian peninsula, where monotheism was new. Clearly, however, appeal was not geographically limited in that way. Cultural kinship may have strengthened a religious appeal, but the religious appeal was clearly an autonomous factor of some strength and resilience.

Dissident Muslims and Rival Arab Prophets:

Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, and there were would-be prophets, beginning during the Prophet’s lifetime and accelerating after his death, who wished to offer flattery in that form. Muslim rule over the entire Arabian peninsula was accomplished by a mix of persuasion and military coercion during Muhammad’s own life. That rule was consolidated after his death, in the same way, by Caliph Abu Bakr.

As for Arab Muslim apostasy, it would have remained a problem only so long as Arab Christianity or tribal polytheism remained viable enough to offer alternatives. Christianity did live on in all the Arab-conquered countries, and there, though it was punishable by death, conversion remained a theoretical possibility. In Arabia itself, organized Christianity ceased to exist, and tribal polytheism survived only in a weak and disorganized form as Bedouin superstition.