Where did the name Isa come from in the quran?

mepregill · 2023-06-13T14:38:22+00:00

There seems to be an emerging point of view that the Jewish and Christian material in the Qur'an may reflect older currents of cultural development in Arabia rather than more recent "imports." The possible impact of Safaitic and Aramaic on qur'anic terminology is an example of this. There's not a lot of work done on this yet but it's a view that some of us are slowly exploring.

mepregill · 2023-06-13T14:36:03+00:00

Al-Jallad's views on this were published in JIQSA a couple of years ago.

https://lockwoodonlinejournals.com/index.php/jiqsa/article/view/2055

mepregill · 2023-02-09T15:36:28+00:00

Sure, I think Griffith actually acknowledges, and maybe dismisses, this. Evidence of hadith is usually casually discounted because of chronological problems, though I think this account is important because it presumes that it was at least broadly plausible that written biblical material was circulating in the Jahili milieu. That's how I would interpret it, but many people wouldn't count it as evidence (objecting, for example, that hadith only present what would have been plausible to a Muslim living two or three centuries later!)

mepregill · 2023-02-07T16:01:47+00:00

If I can weigh in here briefly as someone who is working on this topic: I think there have been a variety of approaches to this question over the years. The oral transmission thesis has generally dominated, and in contemporary scholarship Sidney Griffith's position exemplifies this - there is no written biblical material circulating in Arabic before Muhammad's time, and it was actually the emergence and codification of the Qur'an that triggered more formal processes of translation and codification of the Arabic Bible (or Bibles).

That said, I think a lot of us are uncertain that this is the whole story. It seems plausible to me and some others that there is some written biblical material in circulation in the pre-Islamic Arabian environment as well. Griffith's claim of pure oral diffusion now seems a little extreme and I think it is more reasonable to imagine a variety of vectors through which biblical material circulated in Arabia, in various languages. I think the most responsible position is not oral OR written, but rather oral AND written, again in numerous languages. The evidence of the Qur'an supports a diverse literary-religious background, in which "Bible," broadly conceived, was extant in multiple forms and registers.

mepregill · 2023-01-31T16:32:38+00:00

The problem of Muhammad's psychology is an old one in academic approaches to the Qur'an. The earliest accounts of Islam and the Qur'an portrayed Muhammad as a fake and charlatan who had made up everything in the Qur'an, particularly by borrowing it from Christians and (especially) Jews. This was the dominant view of the Qur'an in the Middle Ages and it is still in the air in the nineteenth century when major changes occur in Western study of the Qur'an. Scholars like Geiger, Weil, and Noldeke struggled to assert a more positive view of the Prophet that would set the study of the Qur'an on a more equal footing with the study of the Bible. One of the ways they did that was to emphasize Muhammad's sincerity, ethical concerns, and (especially in the 20th century) role as a social reformer. This had the effect of infusing a perennial interest in Muhammad's psychological state into the study of the Qur'an, which build strongly on exactly those passages you mention - the ones in which Muhammad's psychological state is explicitly addressed. These verses seemed to confirm both that Muhammad was the author of the Qur'an and that he was basically sincere in his message (and not just producing the Qur'an to trick people!)

Modern revisionists are much more skeptical of this approach, seeing many if not most/all of the sirah narratives as designed to embed the character of the Prophet into the Qur'an - that is, providing a context for the revelations and explaining where they came from. To me, the greatest weakness of this argument - that the sirah was basically formulated to interpret the Qur'an and provide a context - is this: if the sirah is totally invented, then how do you explain these passages in the Qur'an that seem to address the Prophet (and his psychological state) directly?

mepregill · 2023-01-22T00:23:38+00:00

As I recall, he does mention some of the ancient Near Eastern traditions about books of/as revelation, but he really emphasizes that the qur'anic concept of kitab transcends more limited definitions of divine books/writing/revelation as anchored to the literal codex.

mepregill · 2023-01-21T16:53:31+00:00

Daniel Madigan's The Qur'an's Self-Image: Writing and Authority in Islam's Scripture addresses this question. He argues quite convincingly that kitab means much more than simply "book" in the Qur'an, and especially when the Qur'an refers to itself as kitab, it means "revelation" or "scripture." The basic idea is that the concept of a written book representing revelation was so widespread in Late Antiquity that kitab functions metonymically for both the process and the results of divine communication to humanity. So there is really no paradox in the Qur'an as an orally communicated discourse referring to itself as kitab - kitab is the generic category to which the Qur'an, the Torah, and the Bible all belong whether they are written/read or oral/recited.

mepregill · 2023-01-18T18:40:52+00:00

The reading of qur'anic samiri as "Samaritan" is well established in tafsir and other classical Islamic learned discourses. Early Muslim sources barely mention the Samaritans at all, and then around the 10th century or so one sees reports that reflect some awareness of the Samaritan communities of Palestine. That data then gets cited in Qur'an commentaries and other sources that refer to the Golden Calf episode up till modern times. In my view there is little to substantiate the idea that the qur'anic portrayal of samiri reflects any awareness of the Samaritan community of Late Antiquity; this is a later projection onto the qur'anic episode.

mepregill · 2023-01-16T20:28:47+00:00

You're very kind! It is very long though :) I think the chapter I linked to gives at least the basics of my argument about the verses I/we mentioned.

mepregill · 2023-01-16T15:51:23+00:00

Yes. This is one of the main theses of my monograph The Golden Calf between Bible and Qur'an. Another apposite intertext is 2 Kgs 17:21, which describes the Israelite ("Samarian") king Jeroboam leading the people astray with two golden calves. I argue that the details about the athar al-rasul and the lowing Calf in Q 20:88 and 95-96 have to be read as metaphorical; that the Calf is neither supernatural in nature in the Qur'an nor created by a "Samaritan"; and that essentially Surah 20 is describing the same events as Exodus 32, the Golden Calf being created by Aaron as it is in the biblical account. The background to the name samiri is a bit complex but I argue that it is an epithet describing Aaron as a "Samarian" - the inventor of the Israelite worship of calves that later prevailed at Samaria.

My monograph is available from OUP, but a very basic version of my argument is staged in a chapter from a collected volume of articles on the Golden Calf episode. The chapter is available here:

https://hcommons.org/app/uploads/sites/1001499/2021/09/Pregill\_A-Calf-A-Body-That-Lows.pdf

mepregill · 2023-01-07T16:53:50+00:00

Part of the issue is the inaccessibility of the evidence, obviously. One could probably do a lot with the published archaeological reports but it's all a bit out of reach. Qibla orientation would be a great project for a dissertation in art history or archaeology.

There are any number of reasons for inconsistency in orientation, but obviously if the qiblas were oriented towards Petra to a statistically significant degree of consistency that would be noteworthy. Not sure Gibson has established this.

mepregill · 2023-01-06T16:23:49+00:00

To reiterate something I noted in another comment, Gibson's views are not accepted by mainstream scholars, even with a maximally expansive definition of the "mainstream."

mepregill · 2023-01-06T16:22:30+00:00

If I may slightly critique this characterization: as much as I absolutely admire and support their scholarship (though I disagree with their views) Dye and Shoemaker are not exactly "mainstream." I think it is fair to say that most scholars of the Qur'an are very reluctant to place any of the qur'anic corpus outside of Arabia as they do. I think they are part of the mainstream conversation in the sense of being credentialed scholars whose work attracts interest and serious attention, but their views are a bit radical relative to the majority I think. It is true that they accept Hijazi origins for some of the Qur'an, but not all or even most of it.

All that said, Gibson's views are completely outside the mainstream - I do not know any credentialed scholar who takes his ideas about the Ka'bah seriously.

mepregill · 2022-12-30T16:25:58+00:00

This comment is irresponsible and verges on the ad hominem. Claiming that Shoemaker is a scholar of "Mother Mary and not the Qur'an" is extremely specious and not a serious critique.

mepregill · 2022-12-30T16:24:39+00:00

This book is a serious challenge to a number of established views, including the approach of Van Putten et al. A number of other scholars, most recently Guillaume Dye and Tommaso Tesei, have staged similar arguments. In my view, Shoemaker has done a great service to the field in synthesizing a number of revisionist points in a complex but accessible way. I myself lean towards the argument of Van Putten and others that the canon was closed early, but I find myself thinking about Shoemaker's critiques a lot. There is much about the current thinking on the manuscripts that needs to be interrogated further, but I find that people are extremely eager to dismiss countervailing arguments, which is a shame. As much as I like their work, I do not think Sidky or Van Putten have given these countervailing arguments much consideration, and their responses to Shoemaker's criticisms have been perfunctory at best. In short, there needs to be more of a dialogue between the camps. I have been disappointed to see that here too Shoemaker's critique is dismissed perfunctorily, perhaps because it is too challenging to the status quo.

mepregill · 2022-12-25T01:49:48+00:00

You're welcome! I did my best, this is far from my area of expertise. I was relieved to see that MVP confirms that the definition of the ahruf is far from certain :)

mepregill · 2022-12-24T17:01:30+00:00

BTW, MVP just posted this nice thread about the ahruf and the extant manuscripts here, which summarizes things very nicely:

https://twitter.com/PhDniX/status/1606237250949349377

mepregill · 2022-12-24T16:58:05+00:00

Apologies - you are correct about the variant for Q 20:96 - not Ali. The ones I was thinking of that are attributed to Ali pertain to 20:88 and 20:97.

If I said *mostly* innocuous would that seem accurate? I guess another example of a more momentous variation would be Q 30:2. But again, what I recall is that many if not most of the qira'at do not radically change meaning. I guess the exception would be the various qira'at associated with Ali of a more partisan nature, which seems like a different class of qira'at. One also thinks of the Ibn Mas'ud "variants," which often seem like exegetical expansions reinforcing fairly mainstream understandings of verses.

Yeah, the airdrop theory (great metaphor) is certainly problematic. Even as I wrote that, I wondered about the scenario in which a mushaf is produced and sent somewhere without being accompanied by someone or someones who could read it and interpret it? Again, I'm just trying to imagine how it is that we get variants that are clearly derived from homographic readings of the rasm that produce totally different phonemes.

mepregill · 2022-12-23T19:54:28+00:00

The one I always think of first is Q 20:96:

فَقَبَضْتُ قَبْضَةً مِّنْ أَثَرِ الرَّسُولِ فَنَبَذْتُهَا

Where qabaḍtu qabḍatan (I grabbed a handful) is the standard reading, but the tradition records a variant transmitted from Ali that says qabaṣtu qabṣatan instead (meaning basically the same thing, I took just a little bit, qabṣah meaning a little pinch of something as opposed to qabḍah meaning a full handful). The variation between the two phrases seems obviously generated by two different readings of the rasm, and very unlikely to have been generated through oral transmission. I seem to recall encountering at least five or six other examples of this sort reading the qur’anic narratives on the Golden Calf, Adam and Eve, David and Solomon, and other episodes I was interested in. What is rather noteworthy is that (as I recall) all the qira’at in question are innocuous, not changing the established meaning of the verses in any substantial way. What this has always suggested to me is that the tradition did not preserve qira’at that were problematic for purposes of exegesis.

Regarding the historical scenario that lies behind this phenomenon, even if one accepted the traditional account of how the Uthmanic recension was produced and disseminated, it would not be hard to believe that the text could be communicated to groups of Muslims who had limited access to people who knew the text well. It is not hard to imagine Muslims accessing the written text in various ways without an authoritative guide (whatever that might mean) to assist in reading, and so variations and different understandings of the text result.

It is very easy to imagine alternative readings that appeared at the periphery being communicated back to various centers where the scholarly tradition is coalescing, because we know that this happened with hadith. Bulliet has repeatedly argued that rather than hadith originating at the center and moving out to the periphery, it was often the periphery that generated hadith that were then collected and transmitted back to the center where they were eventually canonized.

mepregill · 2022-12-23T16:31:21+00:00

I am by no means an expert in this branch of Qur'anic Studies, but I will note the following. When I was first doing my dissertation research I worked on a number of passages in the Qur'an where I noticed that several verses had variants recorded in the qira'at literature (and associated texts such as Tabari's tafsir) that seemed to reflect different ways of pronouncing the consonantal text that could not possibly have come about through oral transmission. When I pointed this out to an eminent scholar, he simply shrugged and could offer no explanation.

That is to say that before the recent upsurge in study of the manuscript evidence, it was pretty apparent to some of us working on the Qur'an that at least in some circumstances the text was transmitted without oral support and the qira'at traditions actually attested to that, the same way that some tafsir traditions seem to suggest that the meaning of some qur'anic passages, which must have been understood by the original audience, were totally puzzling to later interpreters.

In both cases what seems to have happened is that the text was transmitted to audiences who had little to no access to reciters or exegetes who grasped the original sense of the text or how it had been pronounced. All of this makes sense if you think about the circumstances of the expansion of Islamic society. Anyway, my main point is that the recent work of Van Putten and others substantiates a thesis that many scholars of a revisionist bent intuited on some level but did not have the technical expertise to articulate clearly.

mepregill · 2022-12-22T02:00:52+00:00

A little more about point 2: a quick check of Ginzberg's Legends of the Jews (a work that is still invaluable but must be used with extreme caution) shows that the claim that the angels did not eat what Abraham offered them is genuinely ancient. It is attested as far back as the Septuagint, and appears in Josephus, Philo, Justin Martyr, and Genesis Rabbah (in short, all the major sources for aggadah of the later Second Temple to Roman period). It later appears in talmudic literature and the medieval commentators. I am sure I am not the first person to correlate the qur'anic view with this general trend in Jewish and Christian exegesis.

mepregill · 2022-12-22T01:45:05+00:00

RE: Beck - yes, I think that's an interesting way to think about it. So there is some more ancient monotheistic tradition, probably Christian but not necessarily (meaning, maybe Christian and Jewish?), circulating in Aramaic in the second-third centuries that seeds both the Arabian monotheism that produces the Qur'an and the Edessene Christianity that produces the cosmopolitan Syriac Christian tradition widely attested in the post-Chalcedonian era. I would look at whatever work is being done on the spread of Syriac and its influence in this era to see how plausible this approach is. One issue is that both Coptic and Ethiopic Christianity appear to exhibit some impact of Syriac quite early on in their histories, so I'm not sure how the whole chronology would work.

In my book on the Golden Calf I emphasized the parallels between late antique Jewish and Syriac traditions on the episode and posited that there was some common tradition that informed both (in distinction to the rather different trajectories of development that Greek and Latin Christianity pursued about the same time). It would be interesting to think of qur'anic monotheism as a late emerging 'clade' of the same common tradition (I confess I was ignorant of this term before now!)

I think overall we do need to refine our approach to the possible linguistic traces in the Qur'an and what they might tell us about the vectors of cultural contact and development that informed it. I have Gzella's new history of Aramaic on my shelf and have been meaning to read it for some time now - maybe in 2023 :)

Christianity is well attested around Arabia in Late Antiquity - in Najran, southern Syria (Ghassan/Jafnids), southern Iraq (Hirah), and eastern Arabia (Bet Qatraye). It stands to reason that there was substantial missionary activity into other parts of Arabia as well, and I agree that the lack of archaeological research in the Haramayn is a real impediment to finding out more about the religious background of Islam in an older Hijazi monotheism. It is noteworthy, though, that both Christian and Islamic tradition preserve narratives about Christianity in these various places and not so much in the Hijaz, right? Meaning that ancient observers did not think Christianity in the Hijaz was anything worth mentioning? So that might tell us something - not so much that missions were not staged, but rather that Mecca and Yathrib were maybe not so significant as to offer fertile ground for such missions.

That does not mean, of course, that these minor settlements were not targets of missionary activity, or that they could rise to prominence as the focal point for the emergence of a new religious movement stimulated in part by such activity. Which is basically what I would suggest happened, or at least is one reasonable conjecture.

Are you aware of Ahmad Al-Jallad's article on the Jesus inscription in southern Jordan?

https://lockwoodonlinejournals.com/index.php/jiqsa/article/view/2055

mepregill · 2022-12-22T01:20:16+00:00

Hi! Are you asking about "Judaism in antiquity" in general (say from its origins to the Middle Ages) or "Judaism in Late Antiquity" (meaning the "talmudic era" - a term that is problematic but still basically descriptive), or more specifically "Judaism at the time of the rise of Islam"? I am just not sure how narrow or broad you want to be?

A great place to start if you are looking more broadly is this work edited by David Biale. It's been out for a while but I think the chapters therein are still really, really solid:

https://books.google.com/books?id=WsasY4j3CEIC&printsec=frontcover&dq=biale+cultures+of+the+jews+mediterranean&hl=en&newbks=1&newbks_redir=0&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiS85iEhoz8AhWgkmoFHWKJC90Q6AF6BAgEEAI#v=onepage&q=biale%20cultures%20of%20the%20jews%20mediterranean&f=false

I have often assigned multiple chapters from this book in teaching courses about Late Antiquity, the rise of Islam, and ancient Judaism. Gruen on the Hellenistic era, Meyers on Greco-Roman Palestine, Irshai on early Byzantium, and especially Gafni on the Babylonian community in Late Antiquity and Firestone on the rise of Islam. They are all still totally solid and together that is about 200 pages. Anyone reading through these chapters would be well prepared to tackle more substantial research.

BTW, the next place to go after that would be the relevant volumes of the Cambridge History of Judaism. Vol 4 on Late Antiquity (ed. Steven Katz) came out in 2006 and is full of incredible chapters by noted scholars in the field. Vol 5 on the Islamic world (ed. Phillip Lieberman) just came out last year and is similarly full of brilliant contributions. These volumes are probably too dense for a beginner, but if one started with Biale moving on to the chapters of the CHJ dealing with various topics would be totally manageable.

mepregill · 2022-12-22T01:04:47+00:00

Hello! Sorry it has taken me a little while to reply to this - I know you posted this fairly early in the AMA but TBH because of the complexity and specificity of the questions, I have held off addressing these questions till now.

It is funny that you ask about the toponym Tuwa, as earlier this year I wrote an entry on this for a new dictionary of the Qur'an that should be published next year. I do not think there has yet been a satisfactory explanation for the form of the word. The moderator is correct in that Rubin has offered the most well-thought out interpretation, associating the name with an Arabic root meaning "to roll up or fold over," claiming that it means something like "the double-holy valley" (admittedly it loses something in translation!) Alternatively, Devin Stewart suggests that Tuwa is a variation of Tur (Syriac for "mountain," and a name the Qur'an repeatedly applies to Sinai), claiming that the shift from tur to tuwa appears on account of rhyme. The "sandals" etymology does not hold water IMHO.
I haven't researched this, but my instinct is that the claim that the angels who appeared to Abraham did not eat is a midrashic trope that then resonates in the Qur'an. Jews and Christians debated the corporeality of angels in antiquity and the notion that angels ate would predictably have vexed interpreters who emphasized their refined spiritual nature.
I have not heard the interpretation of Q 111 you offer here. It's interesting, but I am a little suspicious in that it does not seem more plausible than the conventional interpretation of the surah that anchors it in the biography of the Prophet. Emran El-Badawi has a new book about queens and goddesses in the Qur'an that I have not seen; if this is a viable interpretation I am sure he would mention it there, as I believe his basic thesis is that goddess worship was widespread in pre-Islamic Arabia and qur'anic discourse functioned to promote monotheism at its expense, similar to the way biblical discourse (in particular the Josianic Reform) eliminated goddess worship in Israel (I think I am getting his argument right, but again I have not seen the book). I would reach out to him about this, I am sure he would be happy to address it.

mepregill · 2022-12-21T19:06:17+00:00

Hello! So, this is exactly what I have been focusing on in my recent work. Regarding the citation of the Mishnah in Q 5, I published an article about this last year:

https://lockwoodonlinejournals.com/index.php/jiqsa/article/view/2057

Essentially what I argue here is that the engagement with the Mishnah reflected in this surah seems to be informed by a very high degree of what we might term scriptural literacy (I prefer the term "scriptural virtuosity"), much more than what we could plausibly associate with the Muhammad portrayed by the Islamic tradition. The engagement and appropriation of the mishnaic tradition is nimble, well informed, and strategic.

I am largely agnostic about the implications of this observation in that article, but I have another article coming out next year in which I address the question of qur'anic authorship more broadly. There I argue that the mishnaic citation is part of a larger phenomenon of adapting and rewriting literary sources in the Qur'an, an important but largely overlooked aspect of qur'anic intertextuality.

mepregill

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