Among all the books that have been written about God, I myself have written two: one about God in Jewish scripture and another about God in Christian scripture. The book before you—about God in Muslim scripture, the Qur’an—is the third in the series. I am a Christian, a practicing Episcopalian, but I approach God in all three of these books not directly but only through the respective scriptures of the three traditions. I write, moreover, not as a religious believer but only as a literary critic writing quite consciously for an audience crowded with unbelievers.
What this means is that I approach the scriptures not through belief but through a suspension of disbelief. Suspension of disbelief is a notion introduced into English literary criticism by the nineteenth-century poet and critic Samuel Taylor Coleridge. It is by the temporary suspension of disbelief that any of us is able to “let go” and enjoy a novel, a film, or a television series like Game of Thrones on its own terms. When we go to the movies on a summer night and see a romantic comedy, we do not object as the film goes along that the lovers on screen are not real lovers but only two actors pretending to be in love. We disbelieve in their ultimate reality, of course, but for the duration of the film, we “allow” them to be real. We play along.
You can play along in the same way even when a literary character is divine. Not long ago, for a course I taught, I had occasion to re-read Homer’s Iliad, this time in the wonderful Robert Fagles translation. The Greek god Zeus is a major character in that epic—the greatest of the Olympian gods. I do not believe that Zeus exists, but for the duration of my reading, I willingly played along with Homer, allowing Zeus to shape the course of The Iliad as powerfully as he does.
As a Christian, by a kind of reversal, I can temporarily suspend my belief that the God of the Bible is indeed much more than a literary character and take him as no more than that for the duration of an exercise in literary appreciation. Just as I can go to St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome on a Sunday to worship and then go back on a Monday to study its art and architecture, so I can hear Christ’s Sermon on the Mount on Sunday as a part of my worship and then study it on Monday as relevant data about Christ as a literary character. The two exercises are different, deeply so, but they are not mutually exclusive and can be mutually stimulating.
Literary criticism, beginning in this way with the aesthetic experience of a work of literature, is different from literary history or historical criticism. Historical criticism is concerned with such questions as Who wrote this work? When did he write it? Why did he write it? For what audience did he write it? Or did she write it? Or they? Was it originally in the language in which we now read it? What sources did they draw on, if any, as they wrote it, or is it truly an original creation? Has it been revised over time? Is it in circulation in more than one form? If so, which form is best? Is it perhaps the redacted combination of more than one version of itself? What has been its reception over time? Has it been translated? Has it ever been suppressed?
And so forth. Such questions—legitimate as they are, fascinating as they can be, and endless as they also are—are not the subject matter of this book. A scholar may have answered dozens of such questions about a given work of literature, indeed spent a lifetime answering them, without ever quite engaging the work in itself, as an aesthetic creation separable to some extent, as all great works are, from the time and place and circumstances in which it arose. Historical criticism need not interfere with literary appreciation, and the two can often be symbiotic, but the two are even then distinguishable.
In what follows, we will consider a cast of iconic characters who appear both in the Bible and in the Qur’an through an ongoing comparison whose focus at every point will be on God as the understood central character. Our modest goal will be a certain aesthetic appropriation not of the entire Bible or the entire Qur’an but just of these related passages within the two. My hope is that you will join me by whatever suspension of belief or disbelief works for you as I give primary consideration to Allah, God, as the overwhelmingly dominant central figure in the passages from the Qur’an.
Over the centuries, the view most often taken of the Qur’an by Jews and Christians alike has been the view classically taken by Jews of the New Testament—namely, “What’s true is not new, and what’s new is not true.” Non-Muslims have disbelieved and dismissed what Muslims believe of the Qur’an—namely, that it is God’s last word to mankind, the crown of revelation, restoring what Jews and Christians had lost from or suppressed in their scriptures by oblivion or corruption. My invitation here to Jews and Christians and the many others who disbelieve that bold Muslim claim is that, as a modest exercise in literary appreciation, they temporarily suspend their disbelief while together we attempt an engagement with God as the central character of the Qur’an, and with the Qur’an as an elusively powerful work of literature. My invitation to Muslims is that just as they might pray in a mosque on Friday but study its dome as students of architecture on a Tuesday, so they too might play along with this “Tuesday exercise,” this literary engagement with just a few selections from the Qur’an, read in conjunction with matching passages from the Bible. Honoring the Holy Qur’an in this way, as literature, is a way to open it, with sympathy, to new readers.
In the first of my books on God, God: A Biography, I wrote about God as he instructed Israel to remember him:
In times to come, when your child asks you, “What is the meaning of these instructions, laws and customs which Yahweh our God has laid down for you?” you are to tell your child, “Once we were Pharaoh’s slaves in Egypt, and Yahweh brought us out of Egypt by his mighty hand. Before our eyes Yahweh worked great and terrible signs and wonders against Egypt, against Pharaoh and his entire household. And he brought us out of there to lead us into the country which he had sworn to our ancestors that he would give us. And Yahweh has commanded us to observe all these laws and to fear Yahweh our God, so as to be happy for ever and to survive, as we do to this day.” (Deuteronomy 6:20−24)
This was the Yahweh who—as “the LORD” in most translations—is the initially invincible protagonist of the Tanakh or Jewish Bible, which became, as included in the Christian Bible, the Old Testament.1 Yet in the Tanakh, after Yahweh’s encounter with Job, he falls strangely silent: he never speaks again, and it seems that Israel comes to count decreasingly on His “mighty hand.” He is remembered with gratitude and devotion, to be sure, but his power becomes a distant future hope rather than a compelling present reality.
In my second God book, Christ: A Crisis in the Life of God, I wrote about God as Yahweh the Jew—the God of the Jews returning to action as a Jew himself:
In the beginning was the Word:
the Word was with God
and the Word was God. (John 1:1)
And then the stunning claim:
The Word became flesh,
he lived among us,
and we saw his glory,
the glory that he has from the Father as only Son of the Father,
full of grace and truth. (John 1:14)
This claim was stunning less for any arcane metaphysical reason, I argued, than for the fact that this divine Jew, confronted with Caesar as the new Pharaoh, does not, as of old, crush the brutal Roman oppressor with mighty hand and outstretched arm but instead goes meekly to His own Roman crucifixion. Yes, Jesus rises from the tomb, and his followers take his resurrection as the promise of eternal life, and yet Caesar is still Caesar, and in a few decades will destroy the Jerusalem Temple and send God’s people into exile and mass enslavement. If this is victory, the terms have changed so radically as to signal a crisis in the life of God.
But as this book is to be about God in the Qur’an, why am I not talking about Allah—God in the Qur’an—from the first sentence? Why trouble to say even this much about God in those earlier scriptures?
I do so because I undertook this book in early 2017 in the aftermath of an American presidential election heavily impacted by continuing “jihadi” attacks all over the world. Throughout that electoral campaign, fear of further such attacks had been intensely on American minds. During the Republican National Convention in 2016, one prime-time speaker evoked that fear as follows:
On Monday, an Afghan refugee in Germany used an ax and knives to slash and wound train passengers while shouting “Allahu akbar.” Last week, ISIS claimed responsibility after a Tunisian man drove a cargo truck into a crowd in Nice, France. He murdered 84 people including 10 children, three Americans, and injured over 300 others. Two days before that, radical Islamists in Bangladesh killed 20 hostages, including three American college students. Two weeks ago, almost 300 people were killed and more than 200 were wounded in bombing attacks in Baghdad.
Last month, a radical Islamist in Paris stalked a French police officer to his home where he murdered the officer, tortured his wife to death in front of their three-year-old son, while streaming it all on social media. He was pondering out loud whether to kill the three-year-old when he was killed by police.
Two days before that, an attacker pledging allegiance to ISIS killed 49 people in an Orlando nightclub, and wounded dozens more.
All this in just the past 37 days. We cannot let ourselves grow numb to these accumulating atrocities. One analysis estimated that since January 2015 some 30,000 people have been killed at the hands of terrorists.
Newt Gingrich, who spoke these words, was sadly mistaken in believing that electing Donald J. Trump, the Republican nominee, to the American presidency could bring such violence under peaceful control. Trump was elected, but more than a year later, on November 24, 2017, gunmen carrying the black flag of the Islamic State killed more than 300 worshippers at the Bir al-Abed Sufi mosque in Egypt. Gingrich was not inventing the atrocities that he recited, nor was he mistaken in claiming that the Muslim terrorists who perpetrate atrocities like the Bir al-Abed slaughter (it should be noted that many more Muslims than non-Muslims have died at the hands of such terrorists) do invoke Islam as justification and motivation, however repugnant their doing so may be to other Muslims.2 An American writing about the Qur’an, which is the foundation of Islam, could scarcely ignore the fact that all this was in the air or that there are passages in the Qur’an that lend themselves to such terrifying use.
Before this book comes to its conclusion, we may have visited a couple of those passages, but we have some important preliminary work to do. While I would not care to defend the claim that Islam is a “religion of peace,” neither would I defend the same claim for Christianity or Judaism. I do not deny that true religious pacifism has existed at times and still exists in a few places, but not one of these three religions deserves that title. Moreover, to clear the air just a little, we need to consider in general terms the relationship between violence as espoused by a religious community, any religious community, and violence as expressed in that community’s sacred scriptures. In particular, what sort of obligation, if any, does war, strife, or violence in Jewish and Christian scripture impose on either Jews or Christians?
Let me illustrate the complexity of that question for these two traditions by choosing two or three quotations from the scriptures of each, beginning with Christianity. Only then will we be ready to turn again to Islam.
The belief that Jesus is the Word Incarnate—the Word who was with God and who was God before the creation of the world—has been foundational in Christianity for centuries. This is, to be sure, the Christ of faith rather than the Jesus of history, but the faith has its history no less than Jesus does, and, historically, this belief has been central to it. In the Roman Catholicism of my boyhood, every celebration of the Mass ended with the first chapter of the Gospel of John—the very chapter that, quoted above, identifies Jesus as the Word Incarnate. These were the words that the devout Catholic, leaving morning Mass, was to hear last and take with him out into the world.
With that in mind, let us turn to the final appearance of the Incarnate Word of God in the New Testament. This appearance comes at the end of Chapter 19 of Revelation, the last book in the New Testament, where we read:
And now I saw heaven open, and a white horse appear; its rider was called Trustworthy and True; in uprightness he judges and makes war. His eyes were flames of fire, and his head was crowned with many coronets; the name written on him was known only to himself, his cloak was soaked in blood. He is known by the name, The Word of God. Behind him, dressed in linen of dazzling white, rode the armies of heaven on white horses. From his mouth came a sharp sword with which to strike the unbelievers; he is the one who will rule them with an iron sceptre, and tread out the wine of Almighty God’s fierce retribution. On his cloak and on his thigh a name was written: King of kings and Lord of lords.
I saw an angel standing in the sun, and he shouted aloud to all the birds that were flying high overhead in the sky, “Come here. Gather together at God’s great feast. You will eat the flesh of kings, and the flesh of great generals and heroes, the flesh of horses and their riders and of all kinds of people, citizens and slaves, small and great alike.” (19:11–18)
Here, near the end of the New Testament, is a picture of Christ as a warrior mounted on a white horse, His cloak drenched in blood, leading an army similarly mounted, ruling the world with an iron scepter, slaughtering His enemies, “the pagans,” with a miraculous sword, and summoning the vultures to feed on the flesh of their corpses. In the New Jerusalem Bible translation just quoted, the italicized phrases all come from the Old Testament; their multiplication is designed to make this sanguinary passage seem the final victory of Good over Evil. And there are other allusions that could have been italicized. “The wine of Almighty God’s fierce anger,” for example, is an allusion to the Book of Isaiah 63:3−6, in which Yahweh answers as follows the rhetorical question “Why are your garments red / your clothes like someone treading the winepress?”
I have trodden the winepress alone;
of my people, not one was with me.
So I trod them down in my anger,
I trampled on them in my wrath.
Their blood squirted over my garments
and all my clothes are stained.
For I have decided on a day of vengeance,
my year of retribution has come.
I looked: there was no one to help me;
I was appalled but could find no supporter!
Then my own arm came to my rescue
and my own fury supported me.
I crushed the peoples in my anger,
I shattered them in my fury
and sent their blood streaming to the ground.
Is this Christianity? One possible answer is, Of course it’s Christianity. It’s right there in the Bible! Moreover, if American Christianity is the Christianity in question, an extremely familiar anthem comes to mind—namely, the “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” whose opening stanza alludes to God’s trampling his enemies till their blood streams like juice from grapes trampled in a winepress:
Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord:
He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored;
He hath loosed the fateful lightning of His terrible swift sword:
His truth is marching on.
The “terrible swift sword” of Julia Ward Howe’s Civil War battle song is the “sword to strike the pagans with” that comes out of the mouth of Christ in the passage quoted above from Revelation.
So this sort of rhetoric has a Christian history, and even an American history. And yet if you know a Christian, can you not imagine him or her saying, “I don’t care whether all this is in the Bible! This ruthless man-on-a-horse is not the Jesus I believe in! This is not my religion!”
Which answer is correct? In theory, either is correct. A Christian Crusader determined to model himself on the Jesus of Revelation 19:11–21 could do so. Perhaps General William Tecumseh Sherman, marching through Georgia to the sea, felt empowered to do so. A Christian with an absolutist view about Christian scripture might feel himself obligated to do so even now. In practice, however, even if many Christians have thought this way in the past, fewer do so now. Most do not take so absolutist a view of Christian scripture as to regard themselves as remotely obligated to imitate Jesus the mounted mass killer. It would be a grievous mistake to regard Christians as a dangerous population because they honor such scripture as the Word of God. It would be a mistake to fear that any one among their number—any one of them!—just might be led on from scripture to mass murder. What matters, in short, is never what any scripture says in the abstract but what those who honor it as scripture take concretely from it.
Here, now, is an example from Jewish scripture.
In the Book of Exodus, the Israelites, just after miraculously escaping the pursuing army of Pharaoh, must trek through the Sinai Desert to the mountain where God will make His covenant with them. En route, they repulse an attack by the Amalekites. But God, we learn, is not satisfied with mere victory over the Amalekites:
Yahweh then said to Moses, “Write this down in a book to commemorate it, and repeat it over to Joshua, for I shall blot out all memory of Amalek under heaven.” (17:14)
What does it mean to “blot out all memory” of a people? In a word, it means to exterminate that people. God is promising that He will perpetrate genocide against Amalek, and God has a long memory. Centuries later, the Israelite armies have the upper hand against Amalek at last and God shares His intentions with King Saul:
“I intend to punish what Amalek did to Israel—laying a trap for him on the way as he was coming up from Egypt. Now, go and crush Amalek; put him under the curse of destruction with all that he possesses. Do not spare him, but kill man and woman, babe and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and donkey.” (1 Samuel 15:2–3)
Is this Judaism? Again, one possible answer is, Of course, it’s Judaism. It’s right there in the Bible! And, in fact, in the rhetoric of Rabbinic Judaism over the centuries as well as, more recently, that of the State of Israel, “Amalek” has been a kind of shorthand for “deadly enemy of Israel,” whoever at any given moment the enemy of the day might be. Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu declared Iran a “new Amalek” in a 2010 speech given, of all places, in Auschwitz.3 The point of the speech was that Iran constituted an existential threat to Israel, a threat to its very survival, and yet the allusion inescapably evokes the memory of Israel as itself an existential threat—indeed as the literal annihilator—of Amalek, down to the last suckling babe.
The inflammatory charge of genocide, or genocidal intent, is regularly leveled at Israel by its Palestinian antagonist. So this biblical precedent is not so arcane or remote as it might seem. And yet if you know a Jew, can you not imagine him or her saying, “I don’t care whether all this is in Torah or the Book of Samuel or wherever else. This baby-killer is not the God I worship! This is not my faith!”
Which answer is correct? Again, a Jew who wanted to imitate God by dealing with his enemies as genocidally as God dealt with Amalek, an Israeli who wanted to exterminate all the Iranians, does have scriptural warrant for doing so. It would be a grievous mistake, however, to regard the Jews as a dangerous population because they honor such scripture as the Word of God, as if to fear that any one among their number—any one of them!—just might be led on from scripture to genocide. In practice, the overwhelming majority of Jews, including Jewish Israelis, belong to a nation so horrendously traumatized by Nazi genocide that they recoil from the prospect of perpetrating genocide against anybody simply because God was genocidal in the Tanakh. My point, again, is that what matters is not what any scripture says in the abstract but what those who honor it as scripture take concretely from it.
As I have begun in this way, you may well be bracing yourself for a similar cherry-picked shocker from the Qur’an, about which I could ask, Is this Islam? and then go on, as above, to ask, But can you imagine a Muslim who…? and so forth. I could do that, but I am not going to, because my announced subject is not the violence of the Qur’an but God in the Qur’an. God in the Muslim scripture, like God in the Jewish and Christian scriptures, has His violent moments, but there is more to Him than His violence. I did not avoid the topic of violence in my first two books. I will not avoid it here. But I will present it only to the extent that it figures in a larger exposition. It would be a gross distortion—a gross literary blunder—to allow one aspect of any character to eclipse every other aspect. I have engaged the general subject of violence in scripture first only because—for you, my readers, and for me as well—terrorism by Muslims invoking the Qur’an and crying “Allahu akbar” has moved that unwelcome subject to the front of our minds.
I acknowledge that there are passages in the Qur’an, such as several in Sura 9, that a terrorist could use to justify murder, even mass murder. I acknowledge that there are Muslims who do so use those passages, and we have good reason to fear them and defend against them. The danger they pose is real and is spreading. My hope, however, is that by beginning as I have with comparable passages from the Bible, I have created a structure of plausibility for my claim that it would be a mistake—in our historical context, a horrendous, self-defeating mistake—to regard any and every Muslim as a terrorist-in-waiting simply because he or she honors the Qur’an as sacred scripture. I have begun with violent moments in the Jewish and Christian scriptures not as a prelude to immersion in the same violence as found in the Qur’an, but simply to acknowledge in advance that there is violence in the Qur’an, to demonstrate how fully it can be matched in the Jewish and Christian scripture, and then to set the subject aside for selective reintroduction later only as part of a more nuanced and contextualized encounter with the riveting divine character at the center of this classic Muslim scripture.
We will encounter this character not by setting out on a forced march through the Qur’an from first word to last, but rather by following in the footsteps of several thoughtful writers and visiting a set of key episodes or salient personalities taken from the Jewish and Christian scriptures as they appear in the Qur’an. Jews and Christians are often surprised to discover that iconic figures from their scriptures do indeed appear, even repeatedly, in the Qur’an. This striking fact will be for us, in the discussions that follow, a doorway into the Qur’an. How does the Qur’an expand upon, contract, or revise the Bible’s account of a given biblical character or episode? This will be the opening question.
The answer to that question will frame a further question. My Bible-Qur’an comparisons will differ from those that others have attempted (and from which I readily concede that I have learned much)4 by focusing at every point on what Allah reveals directly or indirectly about Himself through the Qur’an’s various allusions, expansions, revisions, and so forth. As much as possible, within this series of explorations, I will avoid expressions like, “The “Qur’an says” or “from the qur’anic point of view.” Expressions like these have the usually unintended but unfortunate effect of muting the presence of Allah, who—through the Angel Gabriel—speaks the Qur’an from its first word to its last. My preference will be to write, whenever possible, “Allah says” or “Allah insists” or the like. In so doing, I will clearly be calling on my non-Muslim readers to engage in a suspension of disbelief and, for the duration of this exercise, to take the Muslim scripture on its own terms. Doing this will be particularly revealing at those points where Allah explicitly corrects what Muhammad may have heard from Jewish or Christian sources. When this is the case, and often even when it is not, I will regularly draw attention to Allah’s version as a correction, in conformity with the standard Muslim assumption.
When speaking of God in the Qur’an, I do usually call Him “Allah,” though I could as easily call Him “God.” Arabic ’ilāh, “god,” becomes ’allāh by the elision of ’al-’ilāh (“the god”). The cognate Hebrew singular noun ’eloah, “god,” becomes the plural ’elohim through the honorific “pluralization of majesty.” When speaking of ’elohim in the Old Testament, I call Him “Elohim,” paralleling “Allah,” though, again, I could as easily call Him “God.” The Qur’an in the Penguin Classics series, which will be our citation text for that scripture, translates ’allāh, with good reason, as “God,” but usage has varied among Qur’an translations into English. Usage has similarly varied among Bible translations regarding the Hebrew God-name yhwh. The New Jerusalem Bible, our citation text for that scripture, translates this name “Yahweh,” where other translations commonly substitute “the LORD.” I too translate yhwh as “Yahweh.” The New Jerusalem Bible translates ’elohim as “God,” though, as already noted, I will translate this name as “Elohim.” When, as often happens, the two Hebrew god-names alternate in a single context, I will regularly write “Yahweh Elohim,” as the Bible itself does early in the Book of Genesis. Confusing as all this now sounds, it will be simple to follow in practice.
As names, Allah, Yahweh, and Elohim do all refer to the same being; but when their presence in the two different scriptures is under comparative consideration, clarity and simplicity are enhanced by using the different names, rather than saying, laboriously, endlessly, and confusingly, “God in the Bible,” “God in the Qur’an,” and so forth. By using the several names, I can reserve God for occasional instances of more general or common reference and for retrospective use in the afterword to this book. For a different reason, clarity is similarly served in discussions of qur’anic texts when singular pronouns referring to God are capitalized—thus, He, His, and Him, though such is not ordinarily my practice. The reason is that in the Qur’an, when Allah is in dialogue with one man or another, the pronoun he often occurs with ambivalent reference. Capitalizing references to Allah makes such passages more easily readable.
Engaging Allah in the Qur’an only through a selected few passages, and these few engaged only in comparison with their biblical counterparts, will make for an informal and conversational encounter with the Muslim scripture rather than an exhaustive, formal one, yet an encounter with its own distinct fascination. In the Qur’an, when Allah instructs Muhammad about what His Prophet is to say about these biblical subjects, He is clearly speaking to someone who knows this subject matter already in a general way and needs only to have his understanding refreshed, corrected, or completed. Allah is the instructor; Muhammad is the pupil; we, as readers of the Qur’an in English translation, are invited to listen in and learn.
What Allah requires of mankind in the Qur’an is, above all, that they should acknowledge His divinity, submitting to him as the one and only God. The Arabic word ’islam means “submission”; the Arabic word muslim (from the same Arabic root s-l-m) names one who has so submitted. Such has been Allah’s requirement from the dawn of human history, the Qur’an teaches, and so its message is emphatically not a new message. As the Qur’an understands religious history, Adam was a muslim in his time; Abraham was another muslim; Joseph a third; and so forth down past the muslim Christ to Muhammad. But a key part of the message of the Qur’an is that the never-changing message of ’islam has been lost or corrupted over the intervening aeons. What Allah, as the author and the speaker of the Qur’an, therefore requires of Jews and Christians is that they should acknowledge that they have lost or adulterated what God revealed to them; and, accordingly, that they should acknowledge their need of Muhammad as the messenger bringing at last Allah’s final and definitive message to them as to all of mankind.
I neither defend nor attack this religious claim. My procedure, rather, is first and last to observe. In both the Jewish and the Christian Bible, God reveals Himself indirectly not only through words but often also through actions that invite characterization by an observant interpreter. Similarly, then, in the Qur’an: By observing closely how the Qur’an revises subject matter that it has in common with the Bible, an observant interpreter may infer how differently the Qur’an characterizes God.
To say this is not to imply that the comparisons ahead will uncover differences alone and not similarities. Far from it! The similarities, on the whole, greatly outnumber the differences, even if it will inevitably be the differences that most intrigue. By an odd and, in my judgment, regrettable symmetry, some Muslims and some Christians deny that their respective scriptures are speaking of the same God. I believe that they do speak of the same God. While the Jewish and Christian scriptures, which came to completion centuries before Muhammad was born, do not ever speak of the Qur’an, the Qur’an does speak of Torah and Gospel, which are important parts of the Jewish and Christian scriptures, and no attentive literary interpretation of the Qur’an can fail to conclude that its divine speaker certainly does identify Himself as the God whom Jews and Christians worship and as the author of their scriptures. Within this tripartite literary identity, however, there are sharply different emphases, and it can be rewarding to discover these different emphases expressed in easily overlooked textual details. It isn’t the devil, in this case, that is in the details but the deity.
The goal is not to put one presentation of God in competition with another, much less to turn Muslims into non-Muslims, or non-Muslims into Muslims. Muslim Americans readily make the Qur’an available in English translation to non-Muslims and welcome them as Qur’an readers, while Christian and Jewish Americans are at least as active in publishing and freely distributing their scriptures. The same can often be said of the publishing arms of other faiths. So then, as we are—all of us—potentially reading each other’s scriptures already, I invite you to join me in nothing more threatening than a comparative reading of a modest selection of paired passages from the Qur’an, on the one hand, and from the Bible, on the other.
We will typically begin with a substantial quote from the Qur’an and then, in the process of discussing it, read more selectively from related passages in the Bible. Our reading of both scriptures will have what I call a theographical focus. Theology typically employs the difficult tools of philosophy. Theography gravitates toward the more user-friendly and descriptive tools of literary appreciation and, to a point, even toward the tools of biography. Rather than attempt to state the significance of the divine character in philosophical terms, theography aspires more modestly to meet him in the same simple way that characters can always be met on the pages of a work of literary art. The only entrance requirement is a willingness to be met and occasionally to be surprised. The goal is not a general introduction to the Qur’an: such an undertaking would obviously require, as a bare starting minimum, reading the entire Qur’an. Neither will the result be, to repeat, an essay in kalam or Islamic theology, pondering the meaning of the traditional ninety-nine “beautiful names” of God and moving on from there.
The goal and my hope is that the result will be a kind of first visit. As a fourteen-year-old boy and a member of my high school’s track team, I was taken by bus to compete at Stagg Field at the University of Chicago. This was my first visit to that university, or any university. When my event was over, and the bus not scheduled to leave for another three hours, I wandered the campus in wonderment: entire buildings devoted to subjects that for me had just been words in the encyclopedia! Botany, paleontology, philosophy—what was behind those doors? I could scarcely guess. The Collegiate-Gothic architecture of the gymnasium itself made it look to me like some kind of strange church. Where was I? What kind of dangerous wonderland had I wandered into?
It was under the grandstand at Stagg Field, as I learned only many years later, that the world’s first self-sustaining nuclear reaction had occurred, in 1942, the year of my birth, under the direction of the great Enrico Fermi. Danger indeed! Stagg Field (built in 1893) was later torn down, to be replaced by the university’s grand Regenstein Library, where I would work as a postdoctoral fellow twenty years later. How little I knew on that first visit of all that surrounded the dilapidated old stadium at the heart of that great university! And yet there was a thrill about that visit. A thrill and a beginning. Think of this visit to the Qur’an as a bit like that one, entirely preliminary but open to the thrill of discovery—even if perhaps you have visited the Qur’an before.
The Bible, almost five times longer than the Qur’an, is a vast anthology, the work of many different authors, who wrote over one thousand years’ time between about 900 BCE and about 100 CE. The Qur’an as historians know it5 came into being during an intense twenty years’ time, late in the life of just one man: the prophet Muhammad, who received it in the early seventh century CE as a revelation from Allah. Our sharply limited double engagement with these two scriptures will be by way of the two exceptional translations already mentioned—namely, The New Jerusalem Bible (Doubleday, 1990) and Tarif Khalidi’s The Qur’an (Penguin Classics, 2009).
The New Jerusalem Bible is a late editorial descendant of La Bible de Jérusalem, a French Catholic translation of the Bible from the original languages, originally published in 1961. The decision that the French team of translators and commentators then made to employ the generally accepted linguistic reconstruction of the proper name of Israel’s God broke with centuries of pious practice, Christian as well as Jewish.
There is no doubt that Ancient Israel did refer to God by his proper name, however it may have been pronounced. After the slaughter of Pharaoh’s pursuing army, Moses and the escaped and victorious Israelites sing a song of victory. In the New Revised Standard Version, this song includes the following:
The LORD is my strength and my might,
and he has become my salvation;
this is my God, and I will praise him,
my father’s God, and I will exalt him.
The LORD is a warrior;
the LORD is his name. (Exodus 15:2–3)
Biblical English, filled with rarely used words like exalt, tends to be heard through an anesthetizing mental filter, but on a moment’s reflection, is it not obvious that “the LORD” bespeaks a title or a role and not a name? The New Jerusalem Bible translates the final couplet:
Yahweh is a warrior;
Yahweh is his name.
The warrant for this translation is simply that it better reflects the Hebrew text as originally written, read, and recited.
This modern reintroduction of Yahweh, however respectfully employed, has provoked various reactions in various quarters. First, the use of a proper name for the one and only God can make Him seem just one god among many. Second, God by another name can seem at first like a “strange god,” even when the stories told of Him conform in every other detail to the familiar biblical outlines. Third, the new usage can seem to scorn centuries of devout practice, Christian as well as Jewish. For the purposes of the comparative reading undertaken in this book, however, I have found it helpful to employ that name, as well as the others mentioned, precisely because doing so allows “Yahweh” to be as “strange” a deity for the average Western reader as “Allah,” with the result, ideally, that both may be seen with fresh eyes. The underlying theographical assumption, however, remains that one and the same unique divine being is being referred to.
The New Jerusalem Bible has been from the outset preeminently a study edition. In the abundance and interpretive energy of its notes and the detail of its elaborate cross-indexing, it was in fact a pioneer among the various study editions of the Bible in English that appeared in the latter half of the twentieth century. Some have found the literary verve of its language too free for a Bible translation, but others (and I include myself) have found this freedom a liberating strength.
The New Jerusalem Bible conveniently includes and integrates portions of the original Christian Bible that were excised or demoted as apocryphal or “deuterocanonical” by the sixteenth-century Protestant reformers and that are not always included even as an appendix in modern English Bible translations published from within the broader Protestant tradition. Since the Bible as it was known in Arabia at the time when the Qur’an was revealed included these later-excised books, The New Jerusalem Bible seems an appropriate citation text for this study.
The Study Quran takes its place within the same, distinctively American tradition of study editions of classic texts. The work of a team of American Muslim scholars, both Sunni and Shi’a, under the editorship of the eminent S. H. Nasr, it is, like The New Jerusalem Bible, meticulously cross-indexed—a great boon to lay Qur’an readers otherwise likely to be bewildered by the work’s way of dealing many times with the same personages. Its copious notes draw on no fewer than forty-one commentators, most of them ancient commentators accessible only to trained exegetes, and these too are an education in themselves.
The style of The Study Quran is self-consciously formal or stately, occasionally employing an archaic expletive like fie! or archaic adverbs like haply and verily and regularly capitalizing not just every pronoun but every noun or adjective that refers to Allah. The rationale for this stylistic choice is the fact that Arabic speakers who hear Allah speaking in the Qur’an do not hear a colloquial or everyday Arabic. As S. H. Nasr writes in his general introduction,
The revelation of the Quran in Arabic lifted this language out of time and created a work that stands above and beyond historical change. Arabic as a human language used for daily discourse of course continued and in fact spread far beyond Arabia, thanks to the Quran itself. This daily language had undergone some changes over the centuries, but even those transformations have been influenced by the immutable presence of the Quran. The language of the Quran has been “dead” to the changes of this world, but has remained most alive as the embodiment of the ever living Word of God.6
I respect The Study Quran editors’ decision to attempt to employ a translation style “above and beyond historical change,” and I have been endlessly instructed by the notes and commentary in this edition, and yet for the purposes of this book, I find the translation approach of Tarif Khalidi, in the Penguin Classics Qur’an, more congenial and—with its sensitivity to poetry and to rhythm within the prose—a better stylistic match for The New Jerusalem Bible. Khalidi writes of his translation, a solo effort:
Where some verses of the Qur’an are mutashabihat (uncertain in meaning) or abrupt, I have not tried to force meaning into them, nor have I altered the frequent mixture of singular and plural verbal forms in the same sentence. At the same time, it appeared to me to be highly desirable to preserve the sentence structure and word order of the Arabic, as well as its idioms, so long as this did not obscure the sense. In other words, I attempted a balance between the familiarly modern and the alienating archaic, while preferring at all times as literal a rendering as possible. In his translation of Beowulf, Seamus Heaney expresses the translator’s dilemma as follows:
It is one thing to find lexical meanings for the words and to have some feel for how the metre might go, but it is quite another thing to find the tuning fork that will give you the note and pitch for the overall music of the work.
In my search for that “tuning fork” I was painfully aware that the cadence of the Arabic could never be truly reproduced, but nevertheless strove for what Heaney calls a “directness of utterance,” in order to convey something of the power of juxtapositions, rhythmic recurrence, sonority, verbal energy and rhymed endings of the original.7
On a few occasions in the chapters that follow, I will cite another translation than Khalidi’s—notably, once or twice, the older translation and commentary of Muhammad Asad, partly because his translation has been widely distributed in the United States by the Council on American-Islamic Relations. Though Asad’s edition has been banned for sectarian reasons in Saudi Arabia, its distribution throughout the English-speaking world in the sumptuous edition of the Book Foundation press has been subsidized, interestingly enough, by a Saudi family, the Alireza.8 The Asad translation is also available online at www.muhammad-asad.com/Message-of-Quran.pdf.
By employing the literary technique that I employ in the chapters that follow, I do not mean to claim that the Qur’an must be read as “just a book.” I take no position in these pages on whether the Qur’an is of divine or human authorship, and I certainly do not claim that Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “suspension of disbelief,” as alluded to in the opening paragraphs of this foreword, is the only viable approach to sacred scripture. Allah, as the author of the Qur’an, instructed Muhammad endlessly to recite—in effect, to proclaim—the revelation that he was receiving through the Angel Gabriel. Muhammad’s first hearers not only understood what they heard but, to historic effect, took it to heart. I know that some Muslim readers may claim, on theological grounds, that to read the Qur’an without the frame of its ancient commentaries is inevitably to misread it. Others may make the further claim that to read it in translation is not to read it at all or that to merely read it even in the original, as opposed to hearing it chanted in Arabic, is not to encounter it as Muslims encounter it.
I have no quarrel with such views, and let my claim in this book be the more modest, if you wish, for such reasons. With only a smattering of Arabic,9 I freely admit that my readings of selected qur’anic passages do not have behind them an encounter with the rhythm and rhyme of the original language. But I know that many Muslims must approach their sacred scripture, as I do, through translations. I welcome them as I welcome all readers, but I will be adequately rewarded if this book responds to no grander need than the sympathetic curiosity of Jews, Christians, and other non-Muslims to ponder the character of Allah even through the screen of translation. Relatively familiar with the character of God as they know Him from the Bible or from Western literature and culture, Jews, Christians, and others may be happy to encounter Him afresh through this side entrance into the Qur’an. My further heartfelt hope is that, having once entered the Qur’an in this way, non-Muslims may move a step past the stereotype that has lingered in the English-speaking world at least since Edward Gibbon wrote, in The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, of “Mahomet, with the sword in one hand and the Koran in the other, erect[ing] his throne on the ruins of Christianity and of Rome.”10 We must all learn, in other words, to read one another’s scriptures, be they secular or sacred, with the same understanding and accommodating eye that we turn upon our own.