Miss Buddha (112 page)

However, hostilities would soon break out
between the Muslims in Medina and the powerful Meccans (whose ax
with Muhammad was still very much unground). But in 630, after a
string of military confrontations and various diplomatic maneuvers,
the Muslims in Medina prevailed and extended their authority over
Mecca.

As a result, before Muhammad died in 632,
the whole Arabian Peninsula was, for the first time in history,
united under the banner of Islam.

Muhammad’s Humanity

Early Muhammad lore does contain some
supernatural events such as his one-night journey from Mecca to
Jerusalem and his subsequent ascent to heaven on the back of a
winged horse. Despite such stories, however, the primary focus of
both biographies about Muhammad, as well as Islamic doctrine in
general, is on his humanity.

For like all prophets before him, Muhammad
was but a mortal man (though not a few Christians may beg to differ
when it comes to Jesus of Nazareth—the Son of god) who was
commissioned by God to deliver a message to his people and to all
of mankind.

Also like other prophets, Muhammad was
distinguished from the man in the street by certain powers and
faculties. For example, Muslims believe that God made Muhammad
sinless in order to support his career as a prophet.

Muhammad is thus portrayed in the Qur’an as
a person who does make mistakes but who does not sin against God.
God, however, being God, did correct Muhammad’s mistakes (which God
viewed as errors in judgment), killing two birds with one stone:
fixing Muhammad’s mistakes while also making his life serve as an
example for future Muslims to follow.

Thus, the Qur’an’s focus on Muhammad as a
regular human being serves as a reminder to all Muslims that all
human beings can reasonably aspire to lead as good a life as he
did.

The Qur’an

As with other prophets and messengers, God
gave Muhammad a hand by allowing him to work a few miracles and so
prove that he indeed was a genuine prophet.

The supreme miracle of Muhammad (and also
the ultimate proof of the truthfulness of Islam) is the Qur’an
itself.

In accordance with the word
of this scripture, Muslims believe that the Qur’an is the
timeless word of God
,
“the like of which no human can produce.” This inimitable property
is based on belief in the divine authorship of the
Qur’an.

For unlike earlier religions, the miracle of
Islam is a literary miracle (i.e., the Qur’an itself), and
Muhammad’s other miracles are all subordinate to it.

This belief in the unique and miraculous
nature of the Qur’an has led Muslims to devote great intellectual
energies to the study of its contents and form, and in addition to
interpreting the scripture and deriving doctrines and laws from it,
many disciplines within Qur’anic studies seek to understand its
linguistic and literary qualities as a further expression of its
divine origins.

The Format of the Holy Book

The Qur’an comprises 114 chapters or suras,
which appear—from the second chapter onward—roughly in order of
length, beginning with the longest and ending with the shortest
chapters.

Chapter one,
al-Fatiha
—the Opening—is
a short chapter which is also recited during each of the five daily
prayers as well as in many other ritual prayers.

All but one chapter begin
with the formula “in the name of God, the Merciful Lord of Mercy”
(Bismillah, ar-Rahman, ar-Rahim”). Each chapter is then divided
into verses called
ayat
(singular
aya
, meaning “sign” or “proof”). With
few exceptions these verses are randomly organized with no coherent
narrative thread.

Any given chapter of the Qur’an can address
any combination of the following themes: God and creation; prophets
and messengers from Adam to Jesus; Muhammad as preacher; Muhammad
as ruler; Islam as a faith and as a code of life; disbelief; human
responsibility and judgment; and society and law.

Muslim scholars have long tried to explain
this randomness of topics and lack of narrative coherence by
arguing that this is due to the timelessness and universality of
the text. In other words, so they hold, the multiple meanings of
the Qur’an transcend linear (human) narrative because they
transcend any particular historical moment.

Above time, then.

The Qur’an and the Bible

Islam does recognize the
divine origins of the earlier Hebrew and Christian Scriptures but
represents itself as both a
restoration
and a continuation of
their traditions.

In order to properly restore the integrity
of these earlier scriptures, the Qur’an freely draws on biblical
stories and repeats many biblical themes. So, not surprisingly
then, several biblical prophets and their stories appear in the
Qur’an, some in a condensed form; other stories, such as those of
Abraham, Moses, and Jesus, are given in elaborate detail and some
even with subtle revisions and restorative additions.

One of these revisions—though not very
subtle—is that the son that Abraham was to sacrifice to God was not
Isaac, from whom the tribes of Israel are descended, but Ishmael,
from whom Arabs descend.

Another not so subtle revision of the New
Testament is the Islamic story of Jesus, who according to the
Qur’an is but a mortal, human prophet as opposed to the Christian
belief that Jesus was born the son of God.

Islam also rejects the idea that God shared
his divinity with any other being, e.g., Jesus Christ.

Another important idea
expounded in the Qur’an and in later Islamic doctrine, opposing
biblical accounts, is that although prophets are capable of human
errors,
God protects them from committing
sins
and also protects them from
excruciating suffering or humiliating experiences; for God would
never abandon his prophets in times of distress.

Therefore, in what has to be viewed by most
Christians as a bit of a stretch, the Qur’an proposes that God
interfered to save Jesus from torture and death by lifting him to
heaven and replacing him on the cross with someone who looked like
him. Think: stunt double.

Not so sure about that one.

The Preservation of the Qur’an

From its inception and during the lifetime
of Muhammad, Islamic doctrine stressed preservation of the
scripture. As a result, one of the earliest expressions of
practiced piety focused on studying, reciting, and writing down the
scripture.

Also, once Muhammad died, the preservation
of the scripture soon became a conscious concern among his
companions and successors. As a consequence, historical sources
refer to immediate efforts undertaken by successors of Muhammad to
collect and properly record (for posterity) all the chapters of the
Qur’an.

Within two or so decades after the death of
the Prophet, various extant copies of parts of the Qur’an were then
collected and collated by a group of close companions of Muhammad
known for their knowledge of the Qur’an.

This committee’s task—commissioned by
Muhammad’s third successor, Uthman ibn Affan—was to standardize the
book, and that committee’s systematic efforts to do just that are
the basis of the codified official text currently used by all
Muslims.

The thematic randomness of verses and
chapters that still characterizes the existing Qur’an tends to
prove that those early companions who recorded this official
version of the Qur’an were, indeed, primarily concerned with
establishing a true replica of the text and made no attempt to edit
its contents in order to produce a coherent narrative.

Based on this, most scholars agree that the
Uthmanic text genuinely reflects, both in its content and form, the
message that Muhammad preached.

Interpretations of the Qur’an

Despite the general consensus among Muslims
on the authenticity of the Qur’an, they also concede that many
words in the Qur’an can be interpreted in many equally valid
ways.

The Arabic language, like other Semitic
languages, consists of both consonants and vowels, and the meanings
of words are derived from both.

For several centuries, however, the written
texts of the Qur’an showed only the consonants—leaving the vowels
to guesswork. Consequently, many words can be vocalized in many
different ways, with (naturally) different meanings, and allowing
for various, all equally legitimate—by the recorded
text—interpretations of the Qur’an.

One of the disciplines of Qur’an scholarship
is exclusively dedicated to the survey and documentation of
acceptable and unacceptable variant readings.

According to Muslim
scholars, there are some 40 possible readings of the Qur’an, of
which only 7 to 14 are legitimate. The equal legitimacy of various
possible interpretations of the scripture is supported by a
statement in the Qur’an itself that portray verses as either
unambiguously clear, or as ambiguous because
they carry a meaning known only to God
.

Therefore, barring a small number of
unquestionably clear injunctions, the meaning of the Qur’anic
verses is rarely final.

While the Qur’an
is
the primary source of
authority, law, theology, and identity in Islam, it is in many
cases either completely silent on important Islamic beliefs and
practices or it gives only general or vague guidelines without
elaboration or clarification. This is, in fact, true of some of the
most basic religious obligations such as prayer, which the Qur’an
stipulates without details.

To compensate, further
details on the teachings and laws of the Qur’an are derived from
the
sunna
, the
example set by Muhammad’s life, and in particular from
hadith
, the body of
sayings and practices directly attributed to him.

Hadith

As the second(ary) source of authority in
Islam, hadith complements the Qur’an and provides the most
extensive source for Islamic law.

The ultimate understanding of the Qur’an is
rooted in Muhammad’s life and the ways in which he demonstrated and
applied his message. There is some evidence to suggest that
Muhammad’s sayings and practices were in response to questions
about Islam raised by his companions. Unlike the Qur’an, however,
in the early periods hadith was only circulated orally, and no
attempts were made to establish or codify it into law until the
second century of Islam.

Due to this late effort to collect and
compile reports about Muhammad’s sayings and practice, Muslim
scholars concede that the authenticity of these reports is not
assured.

In fact, history tends to verify that many
spurious reports of the views and practices of Muhammad were often
intentionally put into circulation by various political and
sectarian groups to support their own views and claims.

Other additions emerged from the natural
tendency to confuse common practices that predated Islam with new
Islamic laws and norms.

The inaccuracy and fading of memory, the
dispersion of Muhammad’s companions over vast territories, and,
finally, the passing away of the last of these companions has also
contributed to the problem of authenticating Muhammad’s sayings and
practices—a rather impossible task.

However, in an attempt to place the
authority of hadith on firmer—and more believable—ground, Muslim
scholars developed several disciplines dedicated to examining and
verifying the relative authenticity of various reports attributed
to the Prophet.

Both the actual contents of
these sayings, as well as the relative reliability of those who
transmitted them, were carefully scrutinized, and, by an
established scale of
believability
the hadiths were classified into sets of varying
authenticity, ranging from the relatively sound and reliable to the
outright fabricated and rejected.

This rather painstaking
effort culminated in the 9
^th
century—some 250 years after
the death of Muhammad—in the compilation of several collections of
what was now deemed to be sound (sahih) hadith. Of six such highly
reliable compilations, two in particular are considered by Muslims
to be the most important sources of Islamic authority after the
Qur’an.

These are
Sahih Muslim
and
Sahih Bukhari
(the sound
books of Muslim and Bukhari).

Islamic Law

Historically, the
assessment and compilation of hadith went hand in hand with the
elaboration of Islamic law and the
parallel development of Islamic legal
theory
.

Initially, neither Islamic law nor its
procedures were systematically developed or elaborated (although
there is little doubt that both the Qur’an and hadith were
regularly used to derive laws to govern the lives of Muslims).

However, by the beginning
of the 9
^th
century, the legal use of these two sources was systematized
and a complex legal theory was introduced.

In its finalized form, this theory maintains
that there are four sources from which Islamic law can be drawn.
These are (in order of priority) the Qur’an, the hadith, the
consensus of the community, and legal parallel.

Invoked only in the absence of explicit
rulings in the Qur’an or hadith, consensus confers legitimacy
retrospectively on historical practices of the Muslim community. In
legal parallel, the causes for existing Islamic rulings are applied
by analogy to similar cases for which there are no explicit
statements in either the Qur’an or hadith.