The Silent Qur’an and the Speaking Qur’an: Scriptural Sources of Islam Between History and Fervor

With regard to the scriptural sources, according to the Sunni tradition which eventually comes to be considered as “orthodox,” matters transpired simply enough. The divine revelations, quite faithfully and integrally collected by the two first caliphs Abū Bakr and ʿUmar, were brought together in a unique Qur’an by a council of scholars during the reign of ʿUthmān, the third caliph (reg. 23/644–35/656)—in other words, less than thirty years after the death of the Prophet Muḥammad (d. 11/632).¹ Parallel Qur’anic recensions, deemed untrustworthy, were destroyed and the official version, the so-called vulgate of ʿUthmān, was rapidly accepted by the entire community of the faithful apart from a scattering of heretics. Moreover, as regards the Hadith, i.e., the prophetic traditions in their thousands, these were subjected to a stringent critical examination by the learned in order to distinguish those that were authentic from those that were false—a process that led to the elaboration of a large and reliable corpus established in accord with the strict rules and criteria of the science of Hadith.²

Now critical research, subjecting Islamic and non-Islamic sources of all sorts to historical and philological examination for over a century and a half, offers a far more complex and problematic picture of the history of the redaction of the sacred Scriptures of Islam. A significant body of statements going back to Muḥammad was quite gradually distinguished in the Qur’an and the Hadith, i.e., identified as the Word of God and prophetic traditions, respectively.³ The official Qur’an, assigned a posteriori to the caliphate of ʿUthmān, was established later, probably during the caliphate of the Umayyad ʿAbd al-Malik b. Marwān (reg. 65/685 to 86/705). Moreover, it bears all the characteristics of a protracted editorial task probably carried out by a team of scribes and qualified scholars. Merely a few decades separate the rules of the two caliphs, but these few dozen years have the force of several centuries given that between the two periods, the immeasurable effects of ceaseless civil wars and vast and dazzling conquests overwhelmed history, society, and the mindset of the first Muslims. Furthermore, even when completed and declared official, the state-sponsored vulgate took several centuries to be accepted by all Muslims. Among the scholars and tendencies opposed to the Umayyad state, a number of important figures would not accept the authenticity of “ʿUthmān’s Qur’an” and considered it a falsified version of the revelations accorded the Prophet; of these, it is the Shi’ites who articulate both the most systematic and the more numerous critiques with respect to the official Qur’an. Other recensions of the Qur’an, often quite different in form and content—as, for example, that of ʿAlī, the cousin and son-in-law of the Prophet and the fourth caliph, or those of the Companions ʿAbd Allāh b. Masʿūd and Ubayy b. Kaʿb—remained in circulation at least until the fourth/tenth century. Likewise, endless discussions over the authencity of hadiths set scholars against one another for centuries. And even when Sunnis toward the fourth/tenth and fifth/eleventh centuries came to increasing agreement in accepting the corpus of what they termed the Sums of Accepted Traditions, Shi’ites established their own corpus in which the very definition of the term hadith diverged from that of the Sunnis. For the latter, Hadith is the totality of traditions traced back to the Prophet (and in some rare instances to certain of his Companions), whereas for Shi’ites the term applies to traditions going back to the Prophet, to his daughter Fāṭima, to ʿAlī, and to the imams descended from them.⁴

As for the endemic violence in which Islam was born and took shape, it is enough to recall certain historical facts which appear settled in their broad outlines. Immediately following the Hijra, the Prophet’s final years were strewn with battle after battle. Of these, the battle of Badr in the year 2/624, the first great victory of the Prophet over his Meccan opponents from his own tribe of Quraysh, seems to have left traces which those same opponents found hard to forget even after their own conversion to Islam. After Muḥammad’s death—by poison according to some rare traditions—the succession to him launched a wave of violence to which I will return later. Under Abū Bakr, the first caliph, the bloody “Wars of Apostasy” (ridda) broke out because he blocked newly converted Arabs from reverting to their ancestral religion after the death of the Apostle of God. According to most accounts, Abū Bakr died a natural death, but according to others he too was poisoned. The period of ʿUmar b. al-Khaṭṭāb, the second caliph, was that in which the wars of the great Arab conquests occurred. He too was killed, apparently by a Persian slave. ʿUthmān b. ʿAffān, the third caliph, was swept away by what is usually called the first great civil war between Muslims. The brief rule of the fourth caliph, ʿAlī b. Abī Ṭālib, consisted of an uninterrupted succession of civil wars: the great Battle of Ṣiffīn pitted him against Muʿāwiya, leader of the powerful Umayyads, his perennial enemies; it was a battle which followed upon the Battle of the Camel (Jamal) against ʿĀ’isha, the Prophet’s widow, allied with two of his Companions; and it was preceded by the battle of Nahrawān against the Khārijites, old allies who had become ʿAlī’s bitterest enemies. In the end it was one of these who assassinated ʿAlī. Umayyad rule was one long series of ghastly suppressions and massacres of their adversaries, most particularly the Alids, “the people of ʿAlī,” who would come to be known as Shi’ites. The hellish cycle of bloody suppression and armed revolts was thus set in motion for a considerable length of time. The most momentous instance is the massacre of al-Ḥusayn, the Prophet’s beloved grandson and the son of ʿAlī, along with amost all his family, by order of the second Umayyad caliph, Yazid I, mere decades after the Prophet’s death. The Umayyads themselves were violently overthrown by a huge armed revolution, that of the Abbasids, under whom the fierce suppression of adversaries, especially of Alids of all stripes yet again, continued intermittently for centuries.

The establishment of a religion, accompanied by violence, notably stemming from the complicated process of its institutionalization or from its imposition on peoples professing other creeds, is clearly not unique to Islam; examples from Judaism and Christianity are too well known to need rehearsing here. Even so, what does seem specific to Islam is, first of all, the nature of this violence, namely, fratricidal wars bringing with them the deaths of a significant number of its most important historical figures, and then, the protractedness, extending over centuries, of bloody conflicts that frequently pitted these very persons against one another. In the present work, various aspects of the questions which have just been adumbrated will be explored in detail. Nevertheless, in order better to grasp the complex of problems to be studied, and in particular the link between historic conflicts and the formation of the canonical writings, it will be useful to say something at the outset about what can be deemed the paradigmatic and fundamental conflict par excellence; one that on both the historical and the doctrinal level lies at the root of virtually all the others, especially during the first centuries of Islam, though also, under various forms, well into our own day.

On the basis of what emerges from the sources, it appears that the death and the ticklish question of the succession to the Prophet in the year 11/632 triggered the first great explosion of violence among believers in the new Arab religion. The matter seemed predictable given that the fragile equilibrium sustaining the diverse gathering of groups and interests that new Muslims represented had been invested in the person of Muḥammad. Once he was gone, the Meccan émigrés who had accompanied him on his hegira formed an opposition to the Medinan “Helpers” who had welcomed him.⁵ His old enemies, the recently converted members of the Quraysh, amongst whom stood the influential Umayyad family, together with his Companions Abū Bakr and ʿUmar, aimed to prevail by neutralizing the ardor of other contenders by any possible means, and most particularly the supporters of his other Companion, his cousin and son-in-law ʿAlī. The confrontations, limited at least for the time being in both time and space, were extremely violent. Following an assembly held in the “public porch” (saqīfa in Arabic) by Helpers from the clan of the Banū Sāʿida, the contest came to be reduced to opposition between Abū Bakr and ʿAlī in which the former rapidly took the upper hand and became the first caliph of Islam.⁶

The Islamic textual tradition has preserved two radically different representations of this episode. The great majority of the religious sources emanating from what would steadily come to be called Sunnism, the dominant tendency in Islam, seems to have tried, in upholding the legitimacy of Abū Bakr, to mitigate, if not conceal, the violence of the confrontations and to turn Abū Bakr into a more or less consensual figure by attempting to minimize the extent of the conflicts. Nevertheless, even the Sunni historical and historiographical sources ⁷ contain enough contrary elements to allow a majority of modern scholars to cast serious doubt on the supposed consensus of Muslims on the election of Abū Bakr and the assumed unity of the Prophet’s companions.⁸ According to most Sunni doctrinal works, the Prophet did not explicitly designate anyone as his successor, neither in his own statements nor by way of Qur’anic revelations (in effect, the “official” Qur’an which we know to contain no mention of this). His community therefore had recourse to ancestral tribal practices that had always marked the succession of a charismatic chief amongst the Arabs: the designation by a council of influential worthies of one of the closest companions of this chief, endowed with respectable age, manifest wisdom, and belonging to the same tribe as he. Abū Bakr met all these conditions and so was elected following the meeting of the Saqīfa, supported by well-nigh unanimous approval, with the notable exception of ʿAlī who in the end allowed himself to be persuaded as well by the wisdom of this choice and a concern to preserve the peace and unity of the community.

The supporters of ʿAlī, who was still quite young at the time (which represented a handicap in the view of some)—those termed Alids or proto-Shi’ites, the most important future minority in Islam—give a quite different version of events. According to Shi’ite sources, Muḥammad explicitly designated ʿAlī as his sole legitimate successor, and did so on several occasions. More decisive still, God Himself had announced this succession through His revelations. In their view it could not be otherwise: how could God and His Messenger have left the crucial question of succession in abeyance? Is it conceivable that they remained indifferent to the leadership of the community of believers to the extent of leaving it in vagueness and confusion? This would be contrary to the very spirit of the Qur’an, according to which the major prophets of the past had chosen successors from among their closest family members, privileged by blood ties and initiated into the secrets of their religion. True, the Qur’an recommends consultation in certain instances, but never with respect to what touches upon the succession of the prophets, which remains God’s choice. Alid-Shi’ite sources, especially in the first centuries after the Hijra, maintain that the original and integral Qur’an, containing numerous explicit mentions and clear allusions to the members of Muḥammad’s family, and, in particular, presenting ʿAlī as his successor, was falsified, heavily censored, and fundamentally altered by ʿAlī’s enemies who usurped power upon the death of the Prophet. Furthermore, this integral Qur’an, far more voluminous than the Qur’an everyone knows, contains explicit mention of the adversaries of both Muḥammad and ʿAlī, those who quite opportunistically, and after much delay, came to Islam. To bar ʿAlī from succession to the Prophet, these adversaries, who finally did seize power, were compelled to censor all such passages and at the same time to deny the authenticity of the Prophet’s statements regarding the election of his son-in-law.⁹ One of the fundamental arguments of those who hold the official Qur’an to have been falsified and elaborated in accord with tradition through the efforts of the first three caliphs, Abū Bakr, ʿUmar, and ʿUthmān, is as follows: one of the most important areas of the Qur’an is what is called the “Tales of the Prophets” (qiṣaṣ al-anbiyā’). In these narratives earlier saints and prophets, notably such biblical figures as Adam, Noah, Abraham, Solomon, David, Moses, Jesus, together with important members of their families (parents, spouses, children, brothers, and sisters) as well as their adversaries (Satan, Nimrod, Pharaoh) are cited hundreds of times. How is it then that in the official version of the Qur’an the Prophet is explicitly cited only four times in all, that none of his enemies is mentioned, nor any member of his family—with the exception of two obscure and enigmatic figures, namely, his adopted son Zayd and Abū Lahab, his hostile uncle? How is it even conceivable that his son-in-law ʿAlī and his daughter Fāṭima, the parents of his only male progeny—that is, his two grandsons al-Ḥasan and al-Ḥusayn—along with figures of the highest importance on the religious level, could be absent from the Qur’an? This silence of the sacred text comes about for a simple reason: censorship undertaken by the men in power, themselves also enemies of ʿAlī, on the original Qur’anic text. That original text, in ʿAlī’s keeping, was hidden out of caution and guarded by the imams who descended from him; it will be publicly revealed only at the end of time. Even so, quite a large number of Shi’ite works provide citations from this hidden Qur’an which do not play any part in the official version of the Qur’an known to all.¹⁰ According to this account, what happened at Saqīfa, right after the Prophet’s death, was a veritable coup d’état, a protracted and shrewdly fomented conspiracy on the part of the two strong men of the Quraysh, Abū Bakr and ʿUmar, to sideline ʿAlī, to seize the new power established by Muḥammad, and to transform the religion of the Prophet into the instrument of their own ambitions.

Now, the respectability of the Companions of the Prophet, indeed the near sanctity of certain of them, and particularly the first three caliphs, on the one hand and the belief in the unimpeachable integrity of the official version of the Qur’an, on the other, very quickly developed into the basic articles of faith of official mainstream Islam—what would come to be called Sunni orthodoxy. The uncompromising position of the Alid minority in opposition to these two doctrines would thus be deemed by various powers to be supremely subversive and heretical from both the political and the religious point of view, resulting in hideous repression and massacres of Alid populations over the course of centuries.

Moreover, these views have almost always been perceived, by Sunni authors, as well as by the great majority of Orientalists in their wake, as strictly ideological and tendentious; that is, lacking in any historical basis. Doubtless this is true; the Shi’ite sources must be subjected to rigorous critical scrutiny, as must be the case in all scientific research. But it must not be forgotten that the Sunnite texts, especially the oldest of them, have been just as ideological and that, in any case, to gain any more nuanced knowledge of a history scarred by the hot iron of civil violence, an examination of the “archives of the opposition,” as the Shi’ite sources might be termed,¹¹ remains just as indispensable as that of the official sources which have had, for the most part, the imprimatur of power. In any case, two decisive factors tend to show that the Shi’ite claims are not merely simplistic concoctions cooked up in the frustration of an impasse and that they need to be taken more seriously than in the past. First of all is the fact that sometimes there are echoes, rare but telling enough, in Sunni literature itself, subjected, as is well known, to severe censorship.¹² Furthermore, with regard to the complex of problems which concerns us here, they display in their broad outlines some striking convergences with the findings of historical-critical research: on the one hand, the hectic, still puzzling history of many points in the redaction of the scriptural sources, the Qur’an and the Hadith, and, on the other, the fratricidal struggles which burst forth immediately following the death of the Prophet, the chief victims of which were ʿAlī, his family, and his faithful followers.

The fundamental conflict setting the pair made up of Abū Bakr and ʿUmar, followed by the Umayyads, in opposition to ʿAlī seems in some ways the peak of the old tensions between the two Qurayshite clans of the Banū ʿAbd Shams and the Banū Hāshim that crystallized after the emergence of Islam in hostility between the most influential members of the Quraysh and the immediate family of the Prophet and that was then radicalized after the latter’s victory at Badr.¹³ This underlies the most blatant violence that Islam experienced during the entire medieval period as well as the hostilities between Sunnis and Shi’ites up to the present day—hostilities the victims of which, in virtually every case, have been the latter, always a minority. What has just been stated concerning the disparities surrounding the elaboration of the scriptural sources, and especially the Qur’an, demonstrates the way in which the history of their redaction has been intertwined with the history of those conflicts, the center of gravity of which is obviously the question of political and religious authority as well as that of its legitimacy. The reason for this is plain: a basic feature of power lies in mastery of religious beliefs, and such mastery cannot be effective except through the control, that is, the codification, of the Scriptures.

It should be made clear from the outset that the Qur’an and the Hadith as such are not the subjects of the present work. As an explication of the Qur’an, the Hadith will form one of our principal focuses of interest, but solely as an historical and doctrinal phenomenon. We do not mean to enter into philosophical and philological discussions over the nuances of such terms as interpretation, commentary, exegesis, hermeneutic, with regard to what distinguishes or unites them; all the more so since early Islam was unaware of these categories and even the distinction between tafsīr (eventually defined grosso modo as “exoteric exegesis”) and ta’wīl (steadily understood as “spiritual and esoteric hermeneutics”) is not always clear during the period that concerns us. These terms, except in explicitly indicated cases, will thus be used as equivalents to designate the literary process whereby the hidden meaning of a text is deciphered as it occurs in the Qur’anic text. Similarly, the technical complexities of the science of Hadith will not be broached; for example, questions connected with chains of transmitters, the authenticity of the text, the structural or literary analysis of the corpus, and so forth.

Our objective is subtle but more modest at the same time: to study certain aspects of the nexus between the historic conflicts at the beginning of Islam and the formation of the canonical Scriptures. Different facets of this subject have been studied, and more than once, from F. Schwally to A.-L. de Prémare, by way of I. Goldziher, L. Caetani, R. Blachère, J. Wansbrough, U. Rubin, H. Djaït, C. Gilliot, H. Motzki, and many others; these are valuable studies, and they will be drawn upon throughout the present work. Still, almost all of these many studies, over nearly a century and a half, have been based on Sunni sources. Shi’ism, with its ancient sources and its take on the history of Islam, studied for only a few decades by a tiny number of scientific researchers, has been much less exploited and still remains inadequately known. The present author attempts here to fill this lacuna in a modest way by adopting a new angle of view to these issues. Over the past two decades, in my seminars at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes at the Sorbonne, I have been able to study several Shi’ite texts dating from the first three or four centuries of the Hijra; these texts are of the first importance and yet remain unjustly unknown. Critical examination of the history of these texts and of their content, whilst at the same time bringing them into conjunction with non-Shi’ite sources as well as with the results obtained by modern research, have shed increasing light on a certain historical and doctrinal logic that allows for a new reading grid, a new framework, for theorizing the articulation between civil conflicts and the formation of the scriptural corpus. These studies, in most cases the very first dedicated to these texts and to their authors, to their history and their contents in the chronological order of their redaction, make up the chapters of our work.

Chapter 1 is devoted to the Kitāb Sulaym ibn Qays, “The Book of Sulaym ibn Qays,” a pseudepigraphical work attributed to a contemporary partisan of ʿAlī and composed of several strata from different dates. The original kernel, the oldest layer, possibly one of the oldest Islamic writings that have come down to us, is probably to be dated from the first quarter of the second/eighth century. It is concerned chiefly with the violence set loose over the problem of the succession to Muḥammad, but it also contains important passages on the early tensions surrounding the elaboration of the scriptural sources.¹⁴

Chapter 2 examines a collection of hadiths (statements traceable to the sacred imams), dating from the third/ninth century (and very probably from the first half) on the fundamental problem of the lack of authenticity of the official version of the Qur’an and the case of the other recensions, especially those that were in circulation in Shi’ite circles. The work in question is the Kitāb al-tanzīl wa l-taḥrīf (The Book of Revelation and Falsification), also known as the Kitāb al-qirā’āt (The Book of Qur’anic Recitations) by Aḥmad b. Muḥammad al-Sayyārī, a capital work not only for the history of early Shi’ism but also for the history of the Qur’anic redaction. The first part of this study devotes considerable attention to the problems posed by the elaboration of the Qur’anic corpus, both with respect to Islamic sources and modern research.¹⁵

The Tafsīr (Qur’an commentary) of al-Ḥusayn b. al-Ḥakam al-Ḥibarī (d. 286/899), doubtless a younger contemporary of the preceding author, is the subject of chapter 3. One of the oldest Qur’anic commentaries to have come down to us, composed of exegetical hadiths, it poses decisive issues linked to a double dialectic: that of the connection linking Qur’an and Hadith, on one side, and that of revelation and the necessity of interpreting it, on the other. At the same time, it appears to convey a primitive form of esotericism in which the hidden meaning of the Qur’an is closely bound up with historical figures and events concealed under the literal sense of the sacred Book of Islam. These figures are identified and disclosed through the exegetical teachings of the members of the Prophet’s family.¹⁶

Last, in chapters 4 and 5, two authors from the second half of the third/ninth century and the first half of the fourth/tenth century, are studied together with their works: al-Ṣaffār al-Qummī and his Kitāb baṣā’ir al-darajāt (The Book of the Perceptions of Degrees) and Muḥammad b. Yaʿqūb al-Kulaynī and his Kitāb al-kāfī (The Book That Suffices, i.e., for a knowledge of religion).¹⁷ Two of the most important, and the most voluminous, older collections of Shi’ite hadiths, these works signal the transition of Shi’ism toward complex religious doctrines in which the infusion of ancient Iranian, Gnostic, and Neoplatonic traditions appear to generate a new doctrinal evolution: the surmounting of history by the advent of a metaphysics of an esoteric and mystical sort. Simultaneously, the connection between Qur’anic exegesis, Hadith, and theology appears to experience a renewal.