In Search of the Original Koran: The True History of the Revealed Text (16 page)

Moreover, the Koran makes an allusion to this milieu when it speaks of the reproach made by miscreants who say: "This is but a forgery of his own invention, in which others have helped him.... Fables of the ancients he has written: they are dictated to him morning and evening!" (25:4-5). But curiously, the Koran does not defend itself against this accusation, as if it acknowledged these miscreants without sharing the conclusions that they want to draw. We know from Tradition that one of the secretaries of Muhammad, Zayd ibn Thabit, knew Syriac and no doubt had access to the religious literature of JudeoChristian or Manichean sects. So here he reproaches Muhammad for having recruited secretaries whose usual function was not only to put the words into writing, but also to shape the text that had been entrusted to them, according to a technique specific to the scribe's job.

In any case, what springs out of the study of the structure of Koranic discourse is its stereotypical aspects, both in rhyme and in repetitiveness, which suggests its oral vocation as a qur'an or recitation.9

We are undoubtedly confronted by a text that is the product of a long effort of elaboration in both its content and its form. But whether this effort was performed by Muhammad alone, or, more probably, with the help of scribes, is a matter of secondary importance: what is important is that the Koranic text offers us a remarkable example of a particular literary genre, in which one may identify and list the techniques used to produce it, and of which one may also determine the evolution throughout the revelation. Then in a second stage, one might compare these techniques with those that were known in Muhammad's time from the writings of Judeo-Christian sects. One might also usefully extend this inquiry to ancient Oriental civilizations, which first perfected a religious and literary rhetoric that one rediscovers in Arab culture.

After the myth of the literalness of revelation, we come to the myth of the jam`, or the collection of Koranic texts into a structured book. This is the second proof offered by Muslim orthodoxy to give credit to the idea of an original text that was entirely and authentically divine. We have already observed that the extreme inequality in length between long surahs and short ones, the total absence of an overall plan for the book and especially for the surahs-all prove incontestably that there was not in Muhammad's lifetime, nor after it, a desire to harmonize the multifarious revealed units contained within a synthetic entity called the Koran, or the Mushaf.

This scriptural entity is veritably mythic in the sense that there does not exist a single Koranic "composition" but several revelations without links between them, and that they were not designed to make up a book. In this regard, let us recall that Uthman was reproached for having reduced the Koran to a single book: "The qur'an was in the form of [several] writings, and you have reduced them into a single one (kana al-qur'anu kutuban fa-taraktaha illa wahidan)."10 We also remember the reluctance attributed to Zayd when the project to collect the Koran was proposed to him. All of this shows the incongruous character of the idea of a Koran, even in the eyes of Tradition, which in this echoes the debates at the time when a Koranic canon was being made official.

When did this canonization take place? Here the paleographic information hardly helps us, since the most ancient known manuscripts do not go back further than the end of the first or end of the second century of the Hijra. No doubt it was in the Umeyyad era that a decision was made to constitute not a book but only a compendium of various sheets (suhufs) put into order according to length and then numbered. So it was a matter more of an official inventory of revealed texts such as they had reached that generation. In order to legitimate such an enterprise, this operation was variously said to be attributed to the third caliph, Uthman, sometimes to Abu Bakr, and even to Muhammad. But this book never received a definitive title, for the Koran did not give one to itself, for the simple reason that the idea of a book was never raised until after the death of the Prophet.

Tradition has insisted upon the idea of an impeccable transmission of the Koranic text from its revelation right down to our day, to prove that the text we possess is well and truly the one of the heavenly tablet that God has preserved from any alteration. It is sufficient to recall the variants that Muslim orthodoxy has itself recognized and even codified under the appellation of gira'at (readings), or ikhtilafat (divergences), in order to reduce this pious pretension to naught. Variations began within the very framework of revelation, since the Koran established the principle of abrogation (naskh).

Moreover, Arabic writing of the period was deficient, deprived of diacritical signs and vocalic signs until a very late date, somewhere between the end of the Umeyyad dynasty and the fourth century of the Hijra. To respond to this objection, people have vaunted the phenomenal capacity of the ancient Arabs to memorize texts and to preserve them from any error. Again, this is a myth that a great authority, Ibn Mujahid (245-324 H), unwittingly undermined when he wanted to explain why there were Koranic variants. He says in his introduction to his Book of the Seven Readings (Kitab al-sab` fi al-gird'at) that it might happen that someone who has memorized the Koran "forgets, and loses what he had received, and he recites the text without discernment. And so he reads it in an arbitrary manner, which leads him, in order to defend his innocence, to attribute this new reading to another reader. And if he is found to be a trustworthy man, then people imitate him. Also, if he happens to forget and to commit an error in good faith, he then sticks firmly to it, and requires it of others." As we see, this testimony about the first Muslim generations refutes definitively the myth of the infallibility of the memory of those reciting the Koran in order to conserve it.

But it is not only memories that give out; scribes are just as fallible as those who recite from memory. Rare are the Koranic manuscripts that have come down to us that are free of errors of transcription. The famous manuscript of Samarkand well illustrates the real risk of errors that may affect the writing, due solely to the fact of there being scribes.

Let us recall here a curious story related by Muslim Tradition concerning an accidental destruction of the Koran by fire during the time of the revelation. Tabarani relates this saying from Muhammad: "If the Koran had been put into leather, the fire would not have consumed it [law kana al-quran fi jild ma `akalathu al-nar]." A similar hadith has been related by Ibn Hanbal: "If one puts the Koran into leather and if one throws it on the fire, the Koran will not burn." Still more intriguing is yet another hadith from Muhammad reported by `Ismat ibn Malik: "If they had collected the Koran in leather (ihab), Allah would not have made it consumed by the fire [ma 'ahraqahu allahu bi al-nar]." What is the mystery behind this destruction of the Koran by fire? Was the Koran partially burned during Muhammad's lifetime? Does this destruction have some relation with the destruction attributed to Uthman of the noncanonical texts of the Koran? Nothing today allows us to go any further with these speculations. But the story is worth remembering in the context of the history of the Koran and of its transmission, which, as we have seen, has been much more fragile than we are led to think by the dogma falsely attributed to the Koran, according to which God was engaged in safeguarding it (inna lahu la- hafidhun), whereas it was the heavenly tablet that was the object of divine care, not the revealed text.

The Koran affirms it categorically: "If humans and dj inns combined to produce a qur'an identical with this one, they could not do so, even though they helped one another as best they could" (17:88). However, this declaration about the inimitability of the revealed text should not be taken literally, for it belongs to a genre that glorifies divine works. Since God is superior to his living creatures, so then everything they are capable of producing could not equal the work of their creator. And so it would be mistaken to draw from any affirmation of the excellence of the Koranic text an argument for its inimitable character. No more so than from elsewhere, when it is said that "if the Koran had not come from God, they [the Impious] could surely have found in it many contradictions [ikhtilaf]" (4:82). In fact, the Koran does contain numerous contradictions, which Muslim Tradition has tried to resolve, notably by resorting to the doctrine of abrogation just as the Koranic theory of ambiguous verses (mutashabih) takes the opposite view in order to assert the absence of contradiction.

However, an admission of contradiction does not in principle prejudge the contribution of human beings to works that are divinely inspired. In fact, the principle of excellence might be equally applied just as much to kahins (soothsayers) and to poets. This claim might simply relate to the status of any revealed work: either it must be the product of God's exclusive contribution, or else agents participate but are responsible for its technical realization, like prophets or scribes, which does not put into question the divine nature of a realization that keeps intact its attribute of excellence. For example, when God granted a favor to Solomon, he had some djinns construct his palace. These djinns were under God's direct supervision (34:12), and they achieved a work that still merits the status of excellence and incomparability, and so on. In short, God often utilizes external agents in the realization of his works, and this does not affect the latter's excellence, or even their divine character, since technically they are the product of a divine wahy that is applied regardless to produce something, either speech or objects. Thus the production of the Koran was confided successively to heavenly agents (such as Gabriel) and then to terrestrial ones (Muhammad and his scribes), all acting through divine inspiration.

Quite another question is the authenticity of the wahy, which should not be confused with the question of the literal authenticity of the text produced through revelation. The authenticity of the wahy gave rise to an intense debate throughout Muhammad's period of prophecy. He was accused of having benefited from the teaching of certain JudeoChristian sectarians with whom he was in contact. The Koran has explicitly recognized these contacts: "We know that they [unbelievers] say: `The one who inspires it [yu`allimuhu] is only mortal.' But the tongue of the man to whom they allude is a pagan, while this is eloquent Arabic speech" (16:103). "Those who do not believe have said: `This is but a forgery of his own invention, in which others have helped him.'. . . And they say: `Fables of the ancients he has written: they are dictated to him morning and evening!"' (25:4-5).