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Historical Errors in the Quran: Difference between revisions
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→Regarding the Traditional Historical Account of the Quran's Origins: have added two more issue's with the Quran's traditional account, citing Michael Cook (Islamic scholar).
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== Regarding the Traditional Historical Account of the Quran's Origins == | == Regarding the Traditional Historical Account of the Quran's Origins == | ||
Modern Academic Scholarship has questioned the traditional Islamic account (from the sirah (biographies), tafsirs (commentaries) and hadith (sayings/traditions of the prophet), which were recorded far later than the time of revelation) of the Quran's creation to varying degrees. While these are heavily debated in academia, those scholars who propose the largest differences are roughly categorised as the [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revisionist_school_of_Islamic_studies Revisionist school of Islamic studies]. While these are not typical historical errors in the sense of the Quran contradicting historical fact, they do undermine the reliability of both Sunni and Shia traditions. Some of their issue's with the traditional account, particularly around the area of preaching are mentioned below. | Modern Academic Scholarship has questioned the traditional Islamic account (from the sirah (biographies), tafsirs (commentaries) and hadith (sayings/traditions of the prophet), which were recorded far later than the time of revelation) of the Quran's creation to varying degrees. While these are heavily debated in academia, those scholars who propose the largest differences are roughly categorised as the [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revisionist_school_of_Islamic_studies Revisionist school of Islamic studies]. While these are not typical historical errors in the sense of the Quran contradicting historical fact, they do undermine the reliability of both Sunni and Shia traditions on the interpretation of the Quran. Some of their issue's with the traditional account, particularly around the area of preaching are mentioned below. | ||
=== Sodom and Gomorrah being located near Mecca and Medina === | === Sodom and Gomorrah being located near Mecca and Medina === | ||
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{{Quote|Holland, Tom. In The Shadow Of The Sword: The Battle for Global Empire and the End of the Ancient World (pp. 39-40). Little, Brown Book Group.|Why, when the savage Northumbrians were capable of preserving the writings of a scholar such as Bede, do we have no Muslim records from the age of Muhammad? Why not a single Arab account of his life, nor of his followers’ conquests, nor of the progress of his religion, from the whole of the near two centuries that followed his death? Even the sole exception to the rule – a tiny shred of papyrus discovered in Palestine and dated to around AD 740 – serves only to compound the puzzle. Reading it is like overhearing a game of Chinese whispers. Over the course of only eight lines, it provides something truly startling: <b>a date for the Battle of Badr that is not in the holy month of Ramadan.</b> 50 Why should this come as a surprise? Because later Muslim scholars, writing their learned and definitive commentaries on the Qur’an, confidently identified Badr with an otherwise cryptic allusion to ‘the day the two armies clashed’ – a date that fell in Ramadan.51 Perhaps, then, on this one point, the scholars were wrong? Perhaps. But if so, then why should they have been right in anything else that they wrote? What if the entire account of the victory at Badr were nothing but a fiction, a dramatic just-so story, fashioned to explain allusions within the Qur’an that would otherwise have remained beyond explanation?}} | {{Quote|Holland, Tom. In The Shadow Of The Sword: The Battle for Global Empire and the End of the Ancient World (pp. 39-40). Little, Brown Book Group.|Why, when the savage Northumbrians were capable of preserving the writings of a scholar such as Bede, do we have no Muslim records from the age of Muhammad? Why not a single Arab account of his life, nor of his followers’ conquests, nor of the progress of his religion, from the whole of the near two centuries that followed his death? Even the sole exception to the rule – a tiny shred of papyrus discovered in Palestine and dated to around AD 740 – serves only to compound the puzzle. Reading it is like overhearing a game of Chinese whispers. Over the course of only eight lines, it provides something truly startling: <b>a date for the Battle of Badr that is not in the holy month of Ramadan.</b> 50 Why should this come as a surprise? Because later Muslim scholars, writing their learned and definitive commentaries on the Qur’an, confidently identified Badr with an otherwise cryptic allusion to ‘the day the two armies clashed’ – a date that fell in Ramadan.51 Perhaps, then, on this one point, the scholars were wrong? Perhaps. But if so, then why should they have been right in anything else that they wrote? What if the entire account of the victory at Badr were nothing but a fiction, a dramatic just-so story, fashioned to explain allusions within the Qur’an that would otherwise have remained beyond explanation?}} | ||
Islamic Scholar Gerard Hawting also discusses these issues in his 2015 paper 'Qur’ān and sīra: the relationship between Sūrat al-Anfāl and muslim traditional accounts of the Battle of Badr'.<ref>Hawting, Gerald. “[https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctvbtznq1.6 QUR’ĀN AND SĪRA: THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN SŪRAT AL-ANFĀL AND MUSLIM TRADITIONAL ACCOUNTS OF THE BATTLE OF BADR.]” In ''Les Origines Du Coran, Le Coran Des Origines'', edited by François Déroche, Christian Julien Robin, and Michel Zink, 75–92. Editions de Boccard, 2015. <nowiki>https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctvbtznq1.6</nowiki>.</ref> | Islamic Scholar Gerard Hawting also discusses these issues in his 2015 paper 'Qur’ān and sīra: the relationship between Sūrat al-Anfāl and muslim traditional accounts of the Battle of Badr'.<ref>Hawting, Gerald. “[https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctvbtznq1.6 QUR’ĀN AND SĪRA: THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN SŪRAT AL-ANFĀL AND MUSLIM TRADITIONAL ACCOUNTS OF THE BATTLE OF BADR.]” In ''Les Origines Du Coran, Le Coran Des Origines'', edited by François Déroche, Christian Julien Robin, and Michel Zink, 75–92. Editions de Boccard, 2015. <nowiki>https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctvbtznq1.6</nowiki>.</ref> | ||
=== Mismatches in law between the Quran and later Islamic texts === | |||
As Islamic scholar Michael Cook notes, there are many differences in religious law between the Quran and the later recorded biographies and 'sahih/authentic' traditions. For example, in regards to stoning adulterers ''(read the primary texts in: [[Qur'an, Hadith and Scholars:Stoning]]),'' where there are many recordings of the prophet ordering stoning as punishment, whilst the Quran only prescribes 100 lashes. | |||
{{Quote|Cook, Michael. The Koran: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions Book 13) (p. 138). OUP Oxford.|The main point in favour of a hypothesis in which the Koran is off the scene for several decades is that it also accounts for another set of puzzles thrown up by research into the early development of Islamic law. Each of these involves an aspect of Islamic law which in some very fundamental way seems to contradict or ignore the Koran. For example, it is notorious that Islam prescribes stoning as the standard penalty for proven adultery (zinā), and accredited traditions about the legal activity of the Prophet portray him as reluctantly implementing implementing this punishment. Yet if we turn to the Koran, this is what we read: | |||
The fornicatress (al-zāniya) and the fornicator (al-zānī) – scourge each of them a hundred stripes. (Q24:2) | |||
How this discrepancy could have arisen was a question to which the Muslim scholars had their answers, one of which we have already encountered in the shape of a hungry goat; but the solutions put forward were neither simple nor straightforward.}} | |||
=== Unknown words in the Quran === | |||
The traditional account contains an extremely detailed and comprehensive collection of oral tradition of biographical reports, hadith and other traditions, supposedly originating from the time of the prophet with unbroken [https://www.britannica.com/topic/isnad isnads (chains of narrations),] from the statement being said to being recorded in writing, to explain the Quran's meaning. However not only are there often contradictory explanations for verses among classical Islamic scholars, there are even unknown words in the Quran. Michael Cook notes that taking the traditional account as history, this should not have happened. | |||
{{Quote|Cook, Michael. The Koran: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions Book 13) (p. 136 - 137). OUP Oxford.|The strange thing about these words is that the student who goes on to make a scholarly career in Islamic studies will still not know what they mean decades later. We met similar obscurities in the verses on the Sabbath-breakers (Q7:163–6). They are typical of a whole cluster of linguistic puzzles in the text of the Koran, and translations can do no more than gloss over them by picking and choosing among a welter of competing guesses. These guesses are usually the work of the Muslim commentators, but Western scholars have not hesitated to contribute new ones of their own. | |||
Sometimes, of course, the obscurity is in place. Sūra 101, as we have seen, begins: ‘The Clatterer! What is the Clatterer? And what shall teach thee what is the Clatterer?’ In such a context it would be presumptuous to rush in too quickly with an explanation; God is making the point that He knows something we don’t. There are also cases where the exigencies of rhyme must be borne in mind: abābīl, sijjīl, and ṣamad are cases in point. | |||
But in other instances there are no such extenuating circumstances. The ‘tribute verse’, which is of fundamental legal importance for the Islamic state, lays down that the unbelievers in question are to pay the tribute ‘out of hand’ (‘an yadin, Q9:29); what this simple phrase intends remains as elusive to modern scholars as it was to the medieval commentators. Two long Medinan verses set out a complex law of inheritance (Q4:11–12), again a very practical matter. The second includes an account of what happens in the event that ‘a man is inherited from by kalāla’; this word, which also occurs in Q4:176, seems to have bothered the commentators from the earliest times, and remains obscure to this day. Something without any such practical significance, but very strange nonetheless, is the fact that about a quarter of the Sūras of the Koran begin with concatenations of mysterious letters to which no meaning can be attached. The first verse of Sūra 19, for example, is k-h-y-’ṣ (this is read by reciting the names of the Arabic letters). | |||
Each such item is a puzzle. Somebody must once have known what it meant, and yet that knowledge did not reach the earliest commentators whose views have come down to us, let alone ourselves. It is only natural that modern scholars should continue to search for solutions. | |||
But the larger puzzle is why obscurities of this kind should be so salient a feature of the Koran. It is not in general surprising that scriptures and classics should be like this. Often a long period separates the culture in which such a work originated from that of the oldest scholarly traditions which interpret its meaning for us. But on any conventional account of the early history of Islam, there should not have been such a gap in the case of the Koran.}} | |||
== External Links == | == External Links == | ||