- Response to Wansbrough claim
- In case you don’t know, he believes the Qu’ran as a closed canon of text existed until the 8th century.
Wansbrough’s work contains many cogent observations about the Qur’anic text, but many of his arguments can be challenged. Even if one concurs with Wansbrough’s specific conclusion on this point, it remains possible that the development he posits could have taken place within thirty years, rather than two hundred. Another objection that has been raised to Wansbrough’s thesis hinges on the fact that certain early (and, it seems, authentic) Islamic texts mention recitation or reading of the Qur’an as a duty, and quote a variety of Qur’anic passages in various contexts, evidently from the author’s memory. Both facts suggest that the Qur’an was already available as a scriptural canon at the time the texts were compiled. (5See al-Qa<;l.”i, “The Impact of the Qur’an on Early Arabic Literature;” eadem, “The Religious Foundations of Late Umayyad Ideology and Practice,” 270-71 (on quotes), 258 (on recitation/reading Qur’an). On the authenticity of the epistles, see al-Qa:Qi, “Early Islamic State Letters.”). A further difficulty with Wansbrough’s interpretation may lie in his view of the variant Qur’anic readings that have been preserved by Muslim tradition. Wansbrough argues that these variants represent the residue of paraphrasing Qur’anic ideas that took place during what he terms the process of “masoretic exegesis” (i.e. textual editing?), which Wansbrough links to the evolution of classical Arabic grammar. This notion, however, has recently been challenged in a careful study of the development of Arabic grammar (Versteegh, Arabic Grammar and Qur’anic Exegesis, 83).
Another weakness in Wansbrough’s case is that he nowhere suggests who was responsible for deciding what did, or did not, belong to the Qur’anic canon. To pin the responsibility for such a process simply on “the community” or “the scholars” is too vague; we need to have some idea of what individuals, or at least what groups, were involved in making such decisions, and what interests they represented; yet Wansbrough remains silent on this question. Similarly, he fails to explain how the eventual Qur’anic vulgate was, in the late second century AH, imposed on people from Spain to Central Asia who may have been using somewhat different texts for a long time, and why no echo of this presumed operation-which, one imagines, would have aroused sharp opposition-is to be found in our sources.
His own observations are not presented as an integrated argument. Rather, Wansbrough creates a series of loosely connected and wide-ranging hypotheses which together seem to imply his main conclusions about the date and provenance of the Qur’anic text by their collective weight and mutually supporting character, rather than because they form a linear set of deductions. 7Some of these overlapping hypotheses take us far afield; Qur’iinic Studies includes not only the initial chapter dealing with the date and provenance of the Qur’an, but also chapters dealing with “Emblems of Prophethood” {a loose discussion of some concepts associated with Mu},lammad’s claim to be a prophet or apostle), with the rise of Classical Arabic {which Wansbrough links to the canonization of the Qur’anic text) and, extensively, with the rise and development of the science of Qur’anic commentary. The latter two themes have recently been re-examined in Versteegh’s Arobic Grommar and Qur’iinic Exegesis; Versteegh acknowledges Wansbrough’s many insights, but does not accept his thesis of a late Qur’anic text {ibid., 77) and challenges many of Wansbrough’s other specific arguments.
The confused presentation of Wansbrough’s works on the Qur’an makes grasping even his basic points all the more difficult. Because Wansbrough offers no fully articulated chain of argument, it is difficult to build a systematic, logical refutation of his interpretation; refutation of a particular point may somewhat undermine the plausibility of the whole. Wansbrough’s awkward prose style, diffuse organization, and tendency to rely on suggestive implication rather than tight argument {qualities not found in his other published works) have elicited exasperated comment from many reviewers: e.g. on Qur’iinic Studies, Paret in Der Islam 55 {1978), 354 bottom; van Ess in Bibliotheca Orientalis 35 {1978), 350; Graham in JAOS 100 {1980), 138; on Sectarian Milieu, Madelung in Der Islam 57 {1980), 354-55; van Ess in BSOAS 43 {1980), 137-39.
As we shall see, the evidence will cast doubt both on Wansbrough’s assertion that the Qur’an crystallized slowly during the first two centuries of the Islamic era, and his view that the text crystallized outside of Arabia. While not serving as absolute proof, our arguments will tend to support the traditional view that the Qur’an text is a literary artifact emanating from the earliest community of Believers in Arabia.
why is the content of the Qur’an so different from that of the other materials? I believe, Wansbrough nowhere addresses.
The discrepancy between Qur’an and hadith on the question of political leadership is striking, and suggests strongly that the two bodies of material are not the product of a common “sectarian milieu,” but come from somewhat different historical contexts. In the face of cogent counter-argument, however, it is not sound historical method to adhere to an argument for which no supporting evidence survives.
A much more natural way to explain the Qur’an’s virtual silence on the question of political leadership is to assume that the Qur’an text, as we now have it, antedates the political concerns enshrined so prominently in the hadith literature. This is what we might expect if the Qur’an text is the product of the time of Muhammad and his immediate followers.
Another argument is the use of tribal groups
Hadiths have anachronisms or at least in some cases. In the Qur’an, on the other hand, we find not a single reference to events, personalities, groups, or issues that clearly belong to periods after the time of Muhammad-‘Abbasids, Umayyads, Zubayrids, ‘Alids, the dispute over free will, the dispute over tax revenues and conversion, tribal rivalries, conquests, etc. This suggests that the Qur’an, as it now exists, was already a “closed” body of text by the time of the First Civil War {35-41/656-61), at the latest. Of course, one might argue that the Qur’an was actually compiled later, as Wansbrough and his followers contend, but that its compilers were very careful to edit out any material that, being anachronistic, might give away the text’s later origins. But such an argument assumes that these supposed compilers-whose identity has never been clarified in any case-possessed an historical-critical sense akin to ours, which seems unlikely. Moreover, even if we accept such an assumption for the sake of argument, we must then explain why people with such discriminating historical sense should have permitted blatantly anachronistic material to thrive so luxuriantly among the sayings ascribed to Mul}.ammad in the ~adzth collections, which they also clearly hoped would serve their various political and theological aims. On the basis of this consideration alone, the thesis that the Qur’an is not an early text, but, like the hadith, the product of the late first and second century AH “sectarian milieu,” must be found wanting.
It is difficult to explain this discrepancy if we assume that all of this material, Qur’an as well as hadith, derives from a common “sectarian milieu.” On the other hand, the traditional view on the date and provenance of the Qur’an provides a much more plausible explanation: the material on the Arabian prophet and his people, like that on Jewish and Christian figures, apparently circulated in the westArabian milieu in which Muhammad lived, but was little-known in Iraq and Syria, where the “sectarian milieu” that produced a good deal of the later hadith literature was found.
There is little evidence to suggest that Greek efolkion in the sense of Arabic fulk was known elsewhere in Arabia outside the l:lijaz, and no evidence whatsoever to suggest that it was known anywhere in the Mediterranean or Near East outside Arabia and the Red Sea. The fact that fulk is preferred by the Qur’an over the more usual Arabic safina is therefore impossible to reconcile with the theory that the Qur’an, like the hadith, crystallized slowly in the “sectarian milieu” of the Fertile Crescent over a period of two centuries or more. The word’s prominence in the Qur’an suggests that the Qur’an originated in west Arabia during Muhammad’s lifetime or shortly thereafter, as traditional scholarship contends. On the other hand, precisely because the word fulk was unknown in the Fertile Crescent or in the Najdi Arabic dialects that played a crucial role in the formation of classical Arabic, it never became current in the hadith, where the more usual Arabic word safina is used when referring to ships.
Conclusion
The evidence reviewed above, which is fairly straightforward, seems to point clearly to a relatively early date for the crystallization of the Qur’an text, and implies that this event must have been completed before the First Civil War. Some other features (such as its attitude toward ritual) suggest that it crystallized not in the Fertile Crescent, but in the Hijaz.
The inscriptions in the Dome of the Rock argues that broader patterns of inscriptional evidence suggest that the traditional Muslim view, that the Qur’an was codified during the caliphate of ‘Uthman, is reliable. A copy of the Qur’an recently discovered in Yemen may provide decisive proof of the early date of the Qur’an. Preliminary descriptions of the manuscript suggest that it may be as old as the first century AH which, if substantiated, would flatly disprove at least Wansbrough’s thesis on the date of the Qur’an.