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"A Macabre Farce"
The Koran is a text, a literary text, and the only way to understand,
explain, and analyze it is through a literary approach," Abu Zaid says. "This
is an essential theological issue." For expressing views like this in print -- in
essence, for challenging the idea that the Koran must be read literally as the
absolute and unchanging Word of God -- Abu Zaid was in 1995 officially branded an
apostate, a ruling that in 1996 was upheld by Egypt's highest court. The court
then proceeded, on the grounds of an Islamic law forbidding the marriage of an
apostate to a Muslim, to order Abu Zaid to divorce his wife, Ibtihal Yunis (a
ruling that the shocked and happily married Yunis described at the time as
coming "like a blow to the head with a brick").
Abu Zaid steadfastly maintains that he is a pious Muslim, but contends that the
Koran's manifest content -- for example, the often archaic laws about the
treatment of women for which Islam is infamous -- is much less important than its
complex, regenerative, and spiritually nourishing latent content. The orthodox
Islamic view, Abu Zaid claims, is stultifying; it reduces a divine, eternal,
and dynamic text to a fixed human interpretation with no more life and meaning
than "a trinket ... a talisman ... or an ornament."
For a while Abu Zaid remained in Egypt and sought to refute the charges of
apostasy, but in the face of death threats and relentless public harassment he
fled with his wife from Cairo to Holland, calling the whole affair "a macabre
farce." Sheikh Youssef al-Badri, the cleric whose preachings inspired much of
the opposition to Abu Zaid, was exultant. "We are not terrorists; we have not
used bullets or machine guns, but we have stopped an enemy of Islam from poking
fun at our religion.... No one will even dare to think about harming Islam
again."
| From the Yemeni Hoard: probably a ninth- or tenth-century Koran.
Photograph by Gerd-R. Puin.
|
Abu Zaid seems to have been justified in fearing for his life and fleeing: in
1992 the Egyptian journalist Farag Foda was assassinated by Islamists for his
critical writings about Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood, and in 1994 the Nobel
Prize-winning novelist Naguib Mahfouz was stabbed for writing, among other
works, the allegorical Children of Gabalawi (1959) -- a novel, structured
like the Koran, that presents "heretical" conceptions of God and the Prophet
Muhammad.
Deviating from the orthodox interpretation of the Koran, says the Algerian
Mohammed Arkoun, a professor emeritus of Islamic thought at the University of
Paris, is "a very sensitive business" with major implications. "Millions
and millions of people refer to the Koran daily to explain their actions and to
justify their aspirations," Arkoun says. "This scale of reference is much
larger than it has ever been before."
Muhammad in the Cave
MECCA sits in a barren hollow between two ranges of steep hills in the west of
present-day Saudi Arabia. To its immediate west lies the flat and sweltering
Red Sea coast; to the east stretches the great Rub' al-Khali, or Empty
Quarter -- the largest continuous body of sand on the planet. The town's setting
is uninviting: the earth is dry and dusty, and smolders under a relentless sun;
the whole region is scoured by hot, throbbing desert winds. Although sometimes
rain does not fall for years, when it does come it can be heavy, creating
torrents of water that rush out of the hills and flood the basin in which the
city lies. As a backdrop for divine revelation, the area is every bit as
fitting as the mountains of Sinai or the wilderness of Judea.
The only real source of historical information about pre-Islamic Mecca and the
circumstances of the Koran's revelation is the classical Islamic story about
the religion's founding, a distillation of which follows.
In the centuries leading up to the arrival of Islam, Mecca was a local pagan
sanctuary of considerable antiquity. Religious rituals revolved around the
Ka'ba -- a shrine, still central in Islam today, that Muslims believe was
originally built by Ibrahim (known to Christians and Jews as Abraham) and his
son Isma'il (Ishmael). As Mecca became increasingly prosperous in the sixth
century A.D., pagan idols of varying sizes and shapes proliferated. The
traditional story has it that by the early seventh century a pantheon of some
360 statues and icons surrounded the Ka'ba (inside which were found renderings
of Jesus and the Virgin Mary, among other idols).
Such was the background against which the first installments of the Koran are
said to have been revealed, in 610, to an affluent but disaffected merchant
named Muhammad bin Abdullah. Muhammad had developed the habit of periodically
withdrawing from Mecca's pagan squalor to a nearby mountain cave, where he
would reflect in solitude. During one of these retreats he was visited by the
Angel Gabriel -- the very same angel who had announced the coming of Jesus to the
Virgin Mary in Nazareth some 600 years earlier. Opening with the command
"Recite!," Gabriel made it known to Muhammad that he was to serve as the
Messenger of God. Subsequently, until his death, the supposedly illiterate
Muhammad received through Gabriel divine revelations in Arabic that were known
as qur'an ("recitation") and that announced, initially in a highly
poetic and rhetorical style, a new and uncompromising brand of monotheism known
as Islam, or "submission" (to God's will). Muhammad reported these
revelations verbatim to sympathetic family members and friends, who either
memorized them or wrote them down.
Powerful Meccans soon began to persecute Muhammad and his small band of devoted
followers, whose new faith rejected the pagan core of Meccan cultural and
economic life, and as a result in 622 the group migrated some 200 miles north,
to the town of Yathrib, which subsequently became known as Medina (short for
Medinat al-Nabi, or City of the Prophet). (This migration, known in Islam as
the hijra, is considered to mark the birth of an independent Islamic
community, and 622 is thus the first year of the Islamic calendar.) In Medina,
Muhammad continued to receive divine revelations, of an increasingly pragmatic
and prosaic nature, and by 630 he had developed enough support in the Medinan
community to attack and conquer Mecca. He spent the last two years of his life
proselytizing, consolidating political power, and continuing to receive
revelations.
The Islamic tradition has it that when Muhammad died, in 632, the Koranic
revelations had not been gathered into a single book; they were recorded only
"on palm leaves and flat stones and in the hearts of men." (This is not
surprising: the oral tradition was strong and well established, and the Arabic
script, which was written without the vowel markings and consonantal dots used
today, served mainly as an aid to memorization.) Nor was the establishment of
such a text of primary concern: the Medinan Arabs -- an unlikely coalition of
ex-merchants, desert nomads, and agriculturalists united in a potent new faith
and inspired by the life and sayings of Prophet Muhammad -- were at the time
pursuing a fantastically successful series of international conquests in the
name of Islam. By the 640s the Arabs possessed most of Syria, Iraq, Persia, and
Egypt, and thirty years later they were busy taking over parts of Europe, North
Africa, and Central Asia.
In the early decades of the Arab conquests many members of Muhammad's coterie
were killed, and with them died valuable knowledge of the Koranic revelations.
Muslims at the edges of the empire began arguing over what was Koranic
scripture and what was not. An army general returning from Azerbaijan expressed
his fears about sectarian controversy to the Caliph 'Uthman (644-656) -- the
third Islamic ruler to succeed Muhammad -- and is said to have entreated him to
"overtake this people before they differ over the Koran the way the Jews and
Christians differ over their Scripture." 'Uthman convened an editorial
committee of sorts that carefully gathered the various pieces of scripture that
had been memorized or written down by Muhammad's companions. The result was a
standard written version of the Koran. 'Uthman ordered all incomplete and
"imperfect" collections of the Koranic scripture destroyed, and the new version
was quickly distributed to the major centers of the rapidly burgeoning empire.
During the next few centuries, while Islam solidified as a religious and
political entity, a vast body of exegetical and historical literature evolved
to explain the Koran and the rise of Islam, the most important elements of
which are hadith, or the collected sayings and deeds of the Prophet
Muhammad; sunna, or the body of Islamic social and legal custom;
sira, or biographies of the Prophet; and tafsir, or Koranic
commentary and explication. It is from these traditional sources -- compiled in
written form mostly from the mid eighth to the mid tenth century -- that all
accounts of the revelation of the Koran and the early years of Islam are
ultimately derived.
Continued...
The online version of this article appears in three parts. Click here to go
to part one. Click here to go
to part three.
Toby Lester is the executive editor of Atlantic Unbound,
the Atlantic Monthly Web site.
Illustration by Adam Niklewicz
Copyright © 1999 by The Atlantic Monthly Company. All
rights reserved.
The Atlantic Monthly; January 1999; What is the Koran?; Volume 283, No. 1; pages 43-56.
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