Article

1. Introduction
2. Much of the qurʾānic corpus is suffused with a selective adaptation of Christian traditions. This diagnosis applies to a panoply of cosmological and eschatological notions, to miscellaneous narratives, and to important aspects of qurʾānic diction (see Ahrens, “Christliches im Qoran”; Andrae, Ursprung; Decharneux, “Maintenir le ciel en l’air”; idem, Creation and Contemplation; Griffith, “Christian Lore and the Arabic Qurʾān”; Reynolds, “Qurʾanic Accusation”; Sinai, “Eschatological Kerygma”; Tesei, “Heraclius’ War Propaganda”; Witztum, “The Syriac Milieu of the Quran”; Zellentin, Law beyond Israel). Moreover, at least sometimes the Qurʾān does not merely employ ideas that are traceable to the Christian tradition or talk about Christians but rather talks to Christians. A good example is Q 4:171, which urges the scripture-owners (ahl al-kitāb) not to “go too far in your religion (dīn),” an admonition that is then concretized by assertions about the status of Jesus (“the Messiah, Jesus son of Mary, was only a messenger of God, and his word that he cast unto Mary, and a spirit from him”), followed by a second-person warning not to “say ‘three’” (wa-lā taqūlū thalāthatun). It is obvious that this is a critique of Christian Trinitarianism and that the scripture-owners addressed here are Christians in particular. Christians, then, are not just a distant religious community far over the Qurʾān’s horizon.

Dye, Shoemaker, Tesei believe the Qur’an is composed outside of the Hijaz because of no Christian tradition within Hijaz. (this is wrong, obviously).

Mollifying the Elephant

First, it can be objected that Dye, Tesei, and Shoemaker are being a tad too categorical. To be sure, the Islamic tradition does indeed portray Mecca as an environment that was “Christ-barren,” to employ Shoemaker’s delightful expression. Yet it is nonetheless worth recalling some potential indicants of a communal Christian presence in and around Mecca that have been excavated by Irfan Shahîd. These include most notably a regrettably succinct reference to a Christian cemetery around Mecca that is preserved in al-Azraqī’s (d. 865 CE) History of Mecca (Shahîd, Fifth Century, 387).

Even so, one may feel that the preceding line of thought is not sufficient to give us enough self-identifying Christians on the Meccan ground, as it were, in order for the Qurʾān to be possible. We should therefore consider, secondly, how proponents of a Ḥijāzī genesis of the Qurʾān might try to accommodate a relative, if not total, absence of communally organized Christianity from pre-qurʾānic Mecca. Accordingly, even if individual Meccans may well have travelled north and south, one ought to avoid hitching one’s confidence that enough Meccans might somehow have come by a sufficient knowledge of Christianity in order for a Ḥijāzī emergence of the Qurʾān to be possible to dubious assumptions about Mecca’s role as an international trade emporium. A second reason to remain hesitant about the supposition of Meccan “cultural tourism,” to use Shoemaker’s language, is that the crux is not merely to explain how Christian knowledge could have found its way to Mecca.

There is, admittedly, no positive evidence at the current time that the Ḥijāz was indeed a significant target of Christian missionary efforts.

If indeed there were missionary efforts of the sort I have just surmised to have existed, they cannot have been very successful, since we do not hear about them in Christian sources: Christian missionaries do not appear to have given rise to a Meccan or Ḥijāzī episcopate that attracted even fleeting mention by Christian authors further north. Christian missionary activity in the Ḥijāz would also give us a sufficient degree of awareness of Christianity as a serious ideological option in order to explain why the qurʾānic proclamations critique Christian belief and practices, and sometimes even address Christians directly .

It is true that certain ideas for which there is ample Christian precedent are numerous and fundamental to the Qurʾān’s own theology. These include various cosmological and eschatological motifs, some stock arguments ( the proof for monotheism evoked in Q 17:42, 21:22, and 23:91 (if there were more than one god, cosmic chaos would ensue) goes back as far as Lactantius; see Crone, Qurʾānic Pagans, 90–91, and now also Decharneux, Creation and Contemplation, 108–9; qurʾānic passages inferring the reality of the resurrection from God’s revivification of dead earth (e.  g., Q 41:39) and from the genesis of humans from sperm (e.  g., Q 36:77–79) have precedents in, and probably derive from, the Christian tradition; see Lehmann and Pedersen, “Beweis” (which should now be consulted together with the more cautious assessment in Eich and Doroftei, Adam und Embryo, 118–125) and Sinai, Key Terms, 123–24), and fragments of memorable phraseology and terminology. An example for the latter category is the expression rūḥ al-qudus (e.  g., Q 16:102), which is manifestly descended from the Christian “Holy Spirit.” Yet it is doubtful that the Qurʾān anywhere conceives of the spirit as a person in a divine trinity. Rather, the qurʾānic spirit seems to be understood either as a quasi-angelic figure or as an impersonal vivifying or fortifying principle emerging from God.

In general, I would therefore submit that the qurʾānic affinity with the Christian tradition is extensive rather than intensive (which is not meant to imply that the Qurʾān is theologically simplistic or to deny that the Qurʾān may be putting forward pointed alternatives to certain aspects of late antique Christian theology). Extensive rather than intensive acquaintance with Christianity fits a scenario of missionary exposure rather well.

1. It must of course be recognized that qurʾānic narrative is often so allusive that many scholars, including myself, feel or have felt compelled to assume some prior exposure to the stories in question on the part of (a significant subsection of) the qurʾānic audience. This general observation also applies to stories that must ultimately have reached the qurʾānic milieu from Christians, like the tale of the Sleepers of Ephesus (qurʾānically, the “Companions of the Cave”) narrated in Sūrah 18 or the accounts of the annunciation of John the Baptist and Jesus in Sūrah 19 (on which see excursus 1 below). Indeed, the qurʾānic retelling of the story of the Sleepers makes explicit reference to disputes surrounding this story in Christian sources, such as the number of the protagonists and the length of time that they spent miraculously asleep in their cave (Q 18:21–22.25–26). Yet stories, even stories with an embedded theological message, can certainly travel much more easily and further afield than more abstract doctrinal propositions that are only meaningful against the background of some level of theological training (or, perhaps, against the background of entrenched confessional affiliations). Moreover, the recounting of stunning miracles and dramatic divine interventions in the lives of specific individuals can be presumed to have suggested itself as an obvious missionary strategy, insofar as it translates the belief system of which the target audience is to be convinced into the universally comprehensible idiom of individual human fates and fortunes.
2. Tesei holds that the Qurʾān often comes across as the “product of a flourishing Christian center”. Yet this is not evidently true. Rather, I would submit that the Qurʾān is actually strikingly devoid of precise theological, heresiographical, and ritual Christian language: there are no clear qurʾānic equivalents for, say, “Dyophysite” or “Eucharist” (even if the “banquet table” sent down upon Jesus’s disciples in Q 5:112–115 has not implausibly been linked to the Last Supper) or for a “person” of the Trinity. Late antique Christianity was in important respects obsessed with ever more finely grained and, to an outsider, obscure doctrinal distinctions – e.  g., if Jesus has two natures, a divine one and a human one, does he also have two wills, a divine one and a human one; and if so, what is the relationship between them? By contrast, the Qurʾān purposefully steers clear of such debates – partly because it rejects their very starting point that Jesus is more than just a human messenger, but also because the Qurʾān articulates a general criticism of gratuitous disagreement in religious matters (e.  g., Q 19:37 and 43:65) (See Sinai, Key Terms, 224–25 and 672). As a result of this qurʾānic lack of interest in the subtleties of Christian theology, it is not clear from the Qurʾān alone how one would talk in Arabic about the two natures of Christ, or the three persons of the Trinity, or Mary’s status as a God-birther (theotokos) (Cf. Dye, “The Qur’anic Mary,” 184), or the sacraments, or even about the tenet that God created the world from nothing, ex nihilo.

My third point in regard to the alleged impossibility of placing much of the qurʾānic corpus in a Ḥijāzī context is to reiterate a proposal made in an earlier publication: when we try to picture what sort of religious milieu the pre-Islamic Ḥijāz might have been, we should avoid thinking in terms of a tidy separation of fully paid-up, card-carrying Christians confronting pagans who rejected Christianity lock, stock, and barrel. Rather, we might envisage a fusion of Arabian cults with a certain number of Jewish and Christian concepts, narratives, and practices (Sinai, The Qur’an, 65–72). Such syncretism, perhaps inspired by precisely the sort of transregional interaction with more explicitly Christian and Jewish groups just conjectured, would tally well with al-Azraqī’s famous report that there were pictures of Mary and Jesus in the pre-Islamic Kaʿbah, even if this account cannot of course be deemed to have an unproblematic claim to historicity (Sinai, The Qur’an, 70). These “associators” or mushrikūn clearly recognized the ultimate cosmic supremacy of a single creator deity, and they also seem to have deployed the notions of intercession and angels. On intercession and angels, see Sinai, The Qur’an, 68–69, as well as Sinai, Key Terms, 438 and 640–42.

1. Decoupling the Qurʾān from Muḥammad?
2. For instance, a recent article by Majied Robinson estimates that the size of the permanent population at Mecca, including children, wives, and slaves, was a mere 552 individuals, though he notes that the number could have been larger if Meccan society had a lower proportion of adult men than suggested by comparative demographic evidence (Robinson, “Population Size”). Based on this, Robinson holds that the Quraysh were decidedly minor players in pre-Islamic Arabia, “a small tribe whose status depended on the goodwill of powerful neighbours.” The small size of Mecca’s permanent population undoubtedly limits the degree of cultural dynamism and religious diversity we may imagine to have played out there.

Testing the Dye-Tesei-Shoemaker Hypothesis

Sinai continues to be unsatisfied by the commentary. First, as Fred Donner has highlighted some twenty-five years ago, the difficulty of pinpointing evidence of conquest-age concerns in the Qurʾān poses a problem for any attempt to date significant parts of the Islamic scripture after the beginning of the proto-Muslim conquests (Donner, Narratives of Islamic Origins, 47–49. See also Sinai, “Consonantal Skeleton,” 515–17). For if the Qurʾān were a mid-Umayyad recomposition of earlier oral traditions, as posited by Shoemaker, it seems exceedingly plausible that we would be entitled to expect the resulting text to reflect both the invaders’ struggle against the Byzantines and the Sasanians as well as the various outbreaks of internal strife within their ranks. After all, at the time that Shoemaker proposes for the closure of the Qurʾān, its authors and redactors would presumably have been ensconced as the intellectual spearhead of a warrior elite who had every interest to explain, to themselves and to anyone else who cared to hear, why God had appointed them to be in charge over a vast tributary subject population (and perhaps also why God had elevated them over other groups within the same warrior elite). On this eminently reasonable supposition, however, one is bound to wonder why the Qurʾān is almost entirely bereft of any specific comments on these topics. Why, for example, is there no explicit qurʾānic endorsement of the proto-Muslims’ right to rule the Holy Land and the former dominions of the Byzantines and Sasanians?

1. Sinai argues against pluralism:
2. The third difficulty that I would like to raise in response to the work of Dye, Tesei, and Shoemaker is linguistic. But then why did the hypothetical authors of these materials call the disciples of Christ al-ḥawāriyyūn, which is derived from Ethiopic ḥawārәyān, and did not for example label them rusul, which is the standard term in later Christian Arabic, or employ some Arabization of Syriac shlīḥē? (see Sinai, Key Terms, 352). Admittedly, the reason why the Qurʾān does not call the apostles rusul may very well be a deliberate attempt to distinguish them from proper prophets or messengers of God. However, this still fails to explain why the alternative to rusul that was selected is a word derived from Ethiopic. In general, the fact that some fundamental religious terms in the Qurʾān would seem to have their closest ancestors in Classical Ethiopic – including terms that figure in Christian-flavored materials, such as al-ḥawāriyyūn or al-shayṭān – sits well with the assumption that the associated traditions did at some point pass through western Arabia (See Sinai, Key Terms, xiii, note 4). Van Putten’s argument that the qurʾānic rasm or consonantal skeleton is consistent with features of Ḥijāzī Arabic; see Van Putten, Quranic Arabic. A similar position, as put forward by Al-Jallad, is criticized as based on “viciously circular reasoning” in Shoemaker, Creating the Qur’an, 134–37.

However, Tesei’s admirable willingness to enter into specific textual detail does make his theory vulnerable on several counts. For one, even the corpus of sūrahs discussed by Tesei contain eschatological statements of the sort that have significant parallels in the New Testament or in Syriac (and other) post-biblical Christian literature. These Christian-flavored eschatological motifs include the splitting or stripping away of the heaven (Q 69:16, 77:9, 78:19, 81:11, 82:1, 84:1), the eschatological earthquake (52:9, 56:4, 79:6–7, 99:1), the blast of the eschatological trumpet (Q 69:13, 74:8, 78:18), and God’s judging of the resurrected on the basis of written records (e.  g., Q 81:10, 84:7–12).105 Phraseologically noteworthy, moreover, are the expressions yawmaʾidhin (Q 88:2.8, 89:23.25, 99:4.6, 100:11), corresponding (probably via Syriac) to Greek en ekeinē tē hēmera (Matt 7:22), and (yawm) al-dīn, “the (day of) judgment”(Q 82:9.15.17–18, 83:11, 95:7), which is evidently derived from Syriac yawmā d-dīnā (Sinai, “Eschatological Kerygma,” 240 and 258).