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Claiming Abraham: Reading the Bible and the Qur'an Side by Side by Michael E. Lodahl (Brazos Press) Many of the Bible's characters and stories are also found in the Qur'an, but there are often differing details or new twists in the Qur'an's retelling of biblical narrative. In this compelling book, seasoned theologian Michael Lodahl explores these fascinating divergences to discover the theological difference they make. Writing from a Christian perspective that is respectful of the Islamic tradition, Lodahl offers an accessible introduction to Muslim theology and to the Qur'an's leading themes to help readers better understand Islam. Lodahl compares and contrasts how the Bible and the Qur'an depict and treat certain characters in common to both religions, including Noah, Abraham, Moses, and Jesus. He offers theological reflection on doctrines held in common by Christians and Muslims, such as creation, revelation, and the resurrection of the body. Lodahl also explores the Jewish tradition as an important source for understanding the Qur'an.

The Shema:

Hear, O Israel:
The LORD is our God, the LORD is one.

The Shahada:

There is no God but God,
and Muhammad is His prophet.

How shall we Christians and Muslims speak with one another? How do we get to know one another, let alone get along? What ideas, experiences, or practices can provide a basis for conversation? Can we really speak with one another, or are we destined only to speak past one another? With our common history all too often marked by violence and venom—Crusaders and colonialism on one side, jihad and terrorism on the other, not to mention media that tend to play up the differences for all their sensationalistic worth—will our words toward each other ever be more than accusations, caricatures, and curses?

I do not pretend to be able to offer a definitive answer to these questions. But I and many others desire to affirm a far deeper sense of hope regarding the Muslim-Christian conversation than all of the tired clichés and typical caricatures would allow. Arguably it is required of us all to nurture such hopes, for it appears that the future of our world, at least humanly speaking, may well hang in the balance. There is undeniably a kind of contesting under way between Islamic culture, particularly in the Middle East, and so-called Western culture—a culture perceived by the great majority of Muslims, more or less correctly, as having been profoundly shaped by the Jewish and Christian traditions. This contesting poses a seemingly constant danger of bursting and flaming out of control not only in the West Bank but also on the West Coast, not only at Israel's borders but also in Indonesia, not only in the Philippines but also in Philadelphia. The pressure is on: it is incumbent upon people of faith, but also people simply of goodwill, to begin the hard task of listening to, appreciating, and hopefully even loving one another across the often harshly drawn lines of varying religious traditions.

In this book I propose one avenue that such difficult conversations might take. I do not think it is the only avenue, and possibly it is not even the best, but I believe it is an interesting and potentially fruitful one. It is the avenue of attempting to read, carefully and sympathetically yet also critically, the sacred texts of religious traditions not our own. This possibility suggested itself to me the first time I read through the entirety of the Qur'an—in English translations, admittedly—several years ago.

I am a Christian minister and theologian, pursuing my vocation primarily as a university professor. One of my interests through the years has involved the challenging task of attempting to understand, and then to communicate to my students, something of the riches of religious traditions other than my (and usually their) own. It is a difficult undertaking, this attempt to engage, appreciate, and even learn from the religious "other"—or, to employ the biblical term, the "stranger." But I, along with many others, have found it to be an undertaking that is inherently rewarding. Most of us have heard the injunction of the book of Leviticus to "love your neighbor as yourself" (19:18), but far fewer of us know that later in the same chapter the Israelites were commanded also to "love the alien as yourself" (19:34). It seems important, too, to add that this commandment to love the stranger is followed by a hauntingly compelling rationale: "for you were aliens in the land of Egypt."

It is as though God called to the fledgling community of Israel—and calls to us even today—to remember what it is like to be the outsider, the excluded, the forgotten one. Remember what it feels like—and know that the "alien" or "stranger" is also a fellow human being, and thus one who can feel the pain of exclusion, of marginalization, of dehumanization. In my best moments, I have tried to nurture in my own heart, as well as the hearts of my students, a glimmer of what it might mean for us to love the religious strangers—that is, people of religious convictions and practices that might appear alien to us—as ourselves. I am hopeful that a sense of this love for "the stranger" will permeate the lines and spaces of this book.

In the light of this biblical calling to love the stranger as oneself, it occurred to me a few years ago that since part of my job is to teach something of Islam to my predominantly Christian students, it might behoove me actually to read through the entire Qur'an! Certainly I had read much of it, mostly in anthologies that offer snippets of the scriptures of the world's great religions. But especially given what had occurred the previous September (the now infamous and immediately recognizable 9/11), it seemed to me that I owed it to myself and to my students to read the entire Qur'an with them. And so, in the spring of 2002, we did.

What I found in that reading was a bit of a shock. I was (and still am) struck by the undeniable power of many passages in the Qur'an, even though I experience them only in English translations. (I have begun the process of learning Arabic during the writing of this book.) But I also was struck by the considerable number of biblical characters whose exploits are renarrated and whose stories are retold—often in noticeably different ways—in the Qur'an. While I am not trained as a biblical scholar per se (by which I mean that my doctoral work was not in biblical studies), my vocation as a theologian demands that I try to be a careful reader of texts, biblical and otherwise. In this book I attempt to read the texts of the Bible and the Qur'an precisely as a theologian, which means constantly asking about the theological assumptions, whether explicit or implicit, animating and arising from the text. Similarly, in asking such questions of the text, we are confronted by the inescapable fact that we readers approach the text already with our own, often unexamined, theological assumptions. To the extent that we acknowledge this, perhaps we may at least occasionally allow our assumptions and prior commitments themselves to be challenged, chastened, or even changed. Our primary goal will be to interpret and reflect upon what the text either implies or directly claims about God and God's relation to the world. To engage in such interpretation is also to wonder about the practical implications these theological claims have for the way we live. What I believe I have found in reading relevant and comparable texts from the Bible and the Qur'an are, at least in some cases we shall explore, distinct theological trajectories. In other words, if I am correct in my reading, then the Bible and the Qur'an often construe God, humans, and the world as a whole in noticeably different ways—and in ways that make for significant differences both in theology and in practice. These significant differences are largely what this book is about.

The idea for this book, in fact, occurred to me first during that spring of 2002 as I read the Qur'an's retelling of one of the Bible's stories of Abraham, found in Genesis 18.1 was repeatedly struck by the differences in detail found in these two narratives; I was also aware of the traditional Muslim assumption that when there are differences between the Bible and the Qur'an, it is to be understood that the latter provides God's correction of the former.' While I confess that as a non-Muslim this is not my assumption, the question still can be raised: Are these differences between the Bible and the Qur'an of any significance? Do the differences make a difference, particularly as the stories in question have been recited, heard, read, studied, and memorized by their respective communities of faith over these many centuries? I suspect that at least sometimes the differences do matter, including those that arise in the telling of the story of Abraham.

But we should appreciate the irony here. It is not uncommon to hear appeals to the fundamental consonance of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam as "Abrahamic" faiths. It is certainly true that the basic plot of the Abraham story provides a lot of common ground for Jews, Christians, and Muslims. But like all clichés, the one that flaunts the notion that these three great monotheistic traditions are "Abrahamic faiths" has just enough truth—and more than enough falsity—to make it dangerous. On the one hand, it is true that believers within all three of these traditions lay claim to Abraham as their father. On the other hand, the ways in which they construe Abraham's patronage and story are so divergent as to yield some very different Abrahams. When my children were much younger, a song they sang regularly in Sunday school began, "Father Abraham had many sons, many sons had Father Abraham."The intertextual exercise we shall undertake in chapter 1, soon to follow, should make it evident that those many sons (and daughters) in turn have, over the centuries, given birth to many different Abrahams!

To be sure, only the most superficial reading of these traditions would come to a less complicated conclusion, such as "Well, we all have Abraham as our father—now isn't that nice? Shouldn't we all just try to get along?" To begin with, many of us recognize that there are real differences simply between Jews and Christians regarding the nature of Abraham's offspring. Indeed, it was probably some of those differences, adamantly and vocally disputed, that brought the issue most sharply to Muhammad's mind. These questions are typical of the Qur'an: "0 People of the Book, why do you dispute concerning Abraham, when the Torah and the Gospel were only revealed after him? Do you have no sense?" (Q3:65).2 Traditionally, Jews trace their physical lineage to Abraham, through his son Isaac, down to Jacob, who through his God-wrestling became Israel. Christians, following the argument of the apostle Paul, trace their lineage spiritually through Jesus back to Abraham, the ancestor "not only [of] the adherents of the law but also [of] those who share the faith of Abraham (for he is the father of all of us . .)" (Rom. 4:16). There are hints aplenty in the Qur'an that the disputations between Jews and Christians regarding Abraham's true progeny, some of which occurred within earshot of Muhammad, cried out for a solution—a solution the Arabic prophet attempted to offer particularly during his years in Medina (622-32 CE).

In chapter 1 we will attempt a careful look at how the Qur'an retells the story of the divine visitation of Abraham as told in Genesis 18. I believe it will provide a fitting and powerful opening exercise in intertextual study. Before doing so, however, I want to acknowledge some of the challenges involved in undertaking a study such as this. First of all, I am not a Muslim. I am not, nor do I seriously entertain the possibility that I might become, a believer within the umma, the worldwide Islamic community. I do not share in their practices, convictions, or culture(s). I am an outsider; thus, from the vantage point(s) of the Muslim community and its rich traditions, it is I who am "the stranger." Given this reality, is it possible for me to pick up the Muslims' holy text and read it truly? Do I not need the help of their history of living with, and within, and out of, the Qur'an? Is it in fact at least a little voyeuristic to read this text as an outsider, bereft of the history of interpretations that shapes Muslim readers and practitioners of the Qur'an? I have tried to mitigate this problem by reading extensively and carefully from a variety of Islamic commentators and writers. Nonetheless, I still stand outside the Islamic circle of conviction and practice. This is a thorny, difficult issue. But it is not the only one.

Next, as I briefly mentioned earlier, I presently do not know the Arabic language well. I cannot read the Qur'an with any facility in its original tongue, and while I am moved by hearing it recited by Muslims trained in the art of its recitation, I am lucky just to pick out an occasional word or phrase. Meanwhile, Muslims traditionally have insisted that to hear the Qur'an truly as God's vocalized, recited Word, one must hear it in its Arabic purity and clarity. In this book, on the other hand, we will be encountering the Qur'an in English translation; this is already a serious dilution, Muslims insist, of the text's inherent and divine power. According to the Qur'an itself, the only miracle that the prophet Muhammad was given to perform was, well, the Qur'an itself—and according to Islamic tradition, in its native Arabic the Qur'an's miraculous nature is indisputable. "This Qur'an could never have been produced except by Allah ... There is no doubt about it. It is from the Lord of the Worlds" (Q10:37). So I am not only an outsider to this rich tradition of practice and interpretation of the Qur'an; I am a stranger also to its cadences, rhythms, poetic beauty, and—by Muslim standards—its miraculous power.

This poetic or aesthetic, ostensibly even miraculous, element of encountering the Qur'an is not, by the way, a minor consideration. Indeed, like many other religious traditions, Islam celebrates the performative dimension of its scripture reading. By this term scholars mean that the power of religious tradition's scriptures is not exhausted simply by understanding the basic meaning of a passage. Beyond the cognitive meaning, the oral performance involved in reading or reciting the text is experienced as possessing a profoundly formative influence upon all who hear it.4 Simply stated, to perform the text is not simply to inform hearers but in fact to transform them—or at least to provide the setting in which such transformation may be possible.

It is helpful to acknowledge that this is far from unique to Islam. Many Buddhists experience recited texts such as the Lotus Sutra in a comparable way, and Hindus' recitation of their ancient scriptures, the Vedas, is also performative. When traditional Catholics who do not actually know the Latin language nonetheless desire to hear the Mass performed in Latin, we are dealing with a comparable phenomenon. Fundamentalist Protestants who insist on using the King James Version of the Bible are probably themselves motivated by a similar fascination with the perceived power of its now-distinctive English prose—a style of language that, by lifelong association and habituation, has become widely identified with the sounds of holiness. I know that in my own churchly upbringing, sometimes the very feelings evoked by the King James idiom were far more powerful in their effects than any perception of cognitive meaning arising from the text.

The point is that, while it is not difficult to understand the idea of a religious text's exercising a performative role in the lives of its devoted readers, this performative function of the Qur'an—utterly crucial for countless Muslims—cannot play a significant role in this book. Instead, we will be reading primarily for theological purposes, attempting to discern how the Qur'an renders biblical narratives and describes characters, including God. Again, I will be reading not as a practicing Muslim from within the Islamic history of tradition but as a Christian theologian who attempts to read these texts critically yet respectfully. This means I will assume that the historical, social, and religious milieu in which the Qur'an came to be is of vital importance for understanding its nature as well as its message. While I will assume that the Qur'an is a historical document, I will also attempt to heed respectfully its claims for itself as well as its claims for God, whom Muslims take to be the very Author of the Qur'an. I presume, however, that listening respectfully to those claims does not require the reader to accept them.

While I do not share the traditional Muslim assumption regarding the purely divine origin of the Qur'an, I hope to proceed with openness to the question of its status as revelation. For now, we can at least admit that, even in translation, there are times when the Qur'an's poetic and literary power is palpable. Particularly in some of Muhammad's earlier revelations, it is difficult to miss the apocalyptic urgency, the world-shattering power, erupting right through the very lines of the text. For example: "When the heaven is rent asunder; and hearkens to its Lord and is judged—and when the earth is spread out; and casts out what is within it and is voided; and hearkens to its Lord and is judged-O man, you strive unto your Lord and you shall meet Him" (Q84:1-6).

Even as we grant this rhetorical power of the Qur'an, in this book we will largely restrict ourselves to the task of encountering the Qur'an for its theological themes rather than for its transformational power—that is, for what we read on its pages rather than for how we might feel when we hear it recited. Similarly, while I do not read it "religiously," I do intend to read it theologically, with respect and care, even as I read it, inescapably, as a person of Christian faith. My primary consolation in this approach is that along with whatever performative and transformative capacities Muslims experience in the recitation or hearing of the Qur'an, they also hear it for what it claims for God and the human relation to God—including the nature of our responsibility before God. Hence it is that Muslim scholars can write learned and detailed commentaries on the Qur'an, engaging in the task of interpretation and application of the text for the sake of faithful Muslim believing and living. It is at this point of attempting to come to terms with the theological message of the Qur'an, then, that we will approach this text. So we will build on the simple observation that, to varying degrees at various times in his ministry, Muhammad understood himself to be offering a message from God that had the potential to heal the rift between Jews and Christians, to say nothing of his message to the growing Muslim community of his own day. To put it simply, Muhammad claimed to be the bearer of a message—something to be heard and understood not only by Muslims but also by Jews and Christians and others. In a sense, then, despite a sense of historical and theological alienation from the Qur'an on the part of most non-Muslims, its claims do invite our careful and critical attention.

With these important provisos in mind, hopefully we are in a position to explore the Qur'an's dramatically divergent retellings of biblical stories, of alternative interpretations of biblical figures and ideas. These differences between the Bible and the Qur'an become evident by laying respective passages, all in English translation, side by side. This procedure itself; however, raises yet another important issue to acknowledge in the early going. My assumption is not at all that Muhammad had written copies of the Jewish and Christian scriptures, or of subsequent Jewish and Christian commentaries on those scriptures, from which he worked. I do not assume that he could have laid written versions of the biblical and qur'anic stories side by side, as I am about to do in most of the chapters to follow. I have no suspicion that Muhammad was intentionally changing details or theological ideas as found in biblical narratives. The Qur'an—a term which, after all, means "recitation"—was produced in an oral culture, where most people's encounter with their sacred scriptures would have been through oral performance. The "Bible" Muhammad would have known, presumably, was a dynamic, fluid stream of oral transmission.' Even though the Qur'an is filled with references to "the Book," this notion of "book" would be far less captive to the columns on a page than our own books are.

Further, I have come to appreciate, even if slowly, that there is a certain ethics of reading that is at risk in this venture. What once seemed to me to be a relatively innocent idea—to lay columns of text from the Qur'an and from the Bible side by side, like parallel passages telling the same story—has grown increasingly complicated.

How and why did I choose the texts that I did? Can they simply be laid side by side like that, as though in each case the passages in question were serving comparable purposes for their faith communities?' One can even raise the question whether when the biblical passage is placed in the left-hand column and the qur'anic passage is on the right, the author or editor who so arranges these texts is already prejudicing readers in at least some subtle ways. I can only confess to an awareness of the weightiness of these issues and assure my readers that I have attempted to pursue this work with these important ethical questions always near at hand. I hope my efforts to be attentive to such issues will be judged to have been at least relatively successful. This does not mean that I expect or even hope that Muslims will find my characterizations of the Qur'an's message to be the same as their own; I am certain that they will not. But I do hope that my engagement will be perceived as respectful, honest, sensitive, and conducive to further conversations.

Allah, there is no God but He, the Living, the Everlasting. He has revealed the Book to you in truth, confirming what came before it; and He has revealed the Torah and the Gospel ... It is He Who has revealed to you the Book, with verses which are precise in meaning and which are the Mother of the Book—and others which are ambiguous. —Qur'an 3:3, 7

It might seem that any book featuring an Opening ought also to have a Closing. Closure is admittedly inviting, perhaps even desirable. But in a book whose chapter on eschatology closes so open-endedly, it is difficult, perhaps impossible, to provide any definitive closing. In the absence of such a closing—of the book, of history's possibilities, of the world as we try to know it, of our struggles to interpret all of these—perhaps a reopening is all we can anticipate. For in the words of a well-worn rabbinic dictum, "The world pursues its normal course." As long as it does so, we find ourselves once more returning to our respective tradition's texts of holy writ, bearing the happy burden of interpretation in behalf of, and in company with, our respective communities. Every opening of these texts is, of course, always already a reopening. We approach, we read, these texts with a history. And we open, we read and interpret and live, these texts in the midst of a history far larger than we are, and we do so within traditions that have struggled long before us to understand and embody these texts. Every opening is a reopening—perhaps more humble than grand—and beckons to us once again to become readers of our scriptures.

I have attempted, in the chapters between this book's Opening and Reopening, to offer a Christian engagement with the Qur'an alongside the Bible and, from time to time, other Jewish writings. I have come to realize ever more surely that no objectivity would have been possible, let alone desirable, in this undertaking. Even so, I can only hope and pray that I have labored amid these texts with at least some measure of integrity and compassion. From such a position, perhaps we may ask about where this journey of reading the Bible and the Qur'an side by side has taken us. I would like to suggest a few fundamental themes, all of which ultimately can be grounded in the specific difference between Christianity and Islam (and, for that matter, Judaism) that emerges from the Christian confession regarding the incarnation of God in Jesus Christ. It is a difference, I fear, too often underappreciated or overlooked by Christians themselves.

The difference makes itself felt quickly in the doctrine of God. The qur'anic depiction of God is indisputably one entailing great might, authority, and transcendence. In short, "Allah ... has power over everything" (Q5:120). To be sure, the Bible often makes comparable claims for God. But as we have explored in the previous two chapters, divine "power over all things" begins to be interpreted differently in light of the Word that became flesh and lived among us ( John 1:14). It seems less like "power over" and more like "empowering." Such a God is a colaborer, a collaborator—the Creator of all things who, in full consistency with the divine nature and indeed as the ultimate revelation of that nature (self-giving, other-receiving love)—enters intimately and truly into the realm of creaturely existence as a human being in order to accomplish the divine purpose of healing all creation. It might be argued that a deity of this nature is anticipated in stories of Genesis, like God bringing the animals to the human to see what he would name them, or God sitting down to dine with Abraham. Perhaps these stories, examined in early chapters of this volume, are early intimations of a theological trajectory that would culminate in the proclamation of the incarnation of the divine Word. This logic of the incarnation, it hardly need be said by now, is forcefully and repeatedly repudiated by the Qur'an.

Accordingly, divine revelation is interpreted in radically divergent manners by these traditions. The Islamic doctrine of God necessitates, apparently, a pristine and perfect recitation of divine words unsullied by human mind or tongue. Christianity, in principle at least, is far more open to recognizing, affirming, and even celebrating the human element in its rendering of revelation. While the Islamic tradition historically has insisted that the Qur'an is purely divine recitation, with Muhammad's role reduced to little if anything more than being an illiterate conduit, Christians have opened and reopened a very different book when they have read the Bible. Indeed, it is more like a library than a book, replete with documents written and edited in many different eras and places and by virtually countless people. Further, its human element is presented on the page.The examples of this are virtually countless, but a particularly revealing one, for our present purposes, comes from Paul as he addressed the Christian community in Corinth.

Frustrated by the divisions in the Corinthian church, Paul wrote, "I thank God that I baptized none of you except Crispus and Gaius, so that no one can say that you were baptized in my name. I did baptize also the household of Stephanas; beyond that, I do not know whether I baptized anyone else" (1 Cor. 1:14-16). Paul frankly acknowledged his uncertainties regarding his own memory, and this has become enshrined in Christian Holy Writ. But this in fact helps to underscore the important point: Paul's letter is not an end in itself, for Paul's purpose in writing it was to establish more firmly this congregation (and, by extension, all Christian congregations) upon the divine foundation "that has been laid; that foundation is Jesus Christ" (1 Cor. 3:11). It is the coming into the world of the Christ, "the power of God and the wisdom of God" (1 Cor. 1:24), and the community forming around him, that captivated Paul. It is no coincidence that this "power of God" and "wisdom of God" is made known in "Christ crucified" (1:23). Paul's letter is not the revelation, and thus by logical extension neither is the Bible per se. For Christian faith, Jesus the Crucified Servant / Exalted Messiah is the revelation. Obviously, this revelation does not spurn the human but is in reality a human—a human who, like all other humans at least in principle, "increased in wisdom and in years, and in divine and human favor" (Luke 2:52). In Christian confession, this human "offered up prayers and supplications, with loud cries and tears, to the one who was able to save him from death, and he was heard because of his reverent submission . . . [and] learned obedience through what he suffered; and ... [thus] became the source of eternal salvation for all who obey him" (Heb. 5:7-9).

As became evident particularly in chapters 2 and 3 of this volume, for traditional Muslims the Qur'an (in Arabic, of course) is the textual embodiment of Umm al Kitab, the "Mother of the Book" that resides in the divine realm. Within a few centuries after Muhammad, Muslim scholars were engaged in disputations regarding whether this heavenly book was "created" or "uncreated"—intriguingly similar to the arguments among Christian thinkers about the nature of God's Logos that climaxed in the Council of Nicaea in 325. In that council the Alexandrian priest Arius was condemned as a heretic for teaching that the Logos that became human and lived among us was not God but in fact the highest and greatest of God's creatures. Athanasius championed the winning side of the argument at Nicaea, insisting against Arius that the Logos or Son participated thoroughly in the divine nature and thus was truly and fully God.

The fallout of these debates is instructive for us. Perhaps most significantly, in both Christianity and Islam those who argued for the "uncreated" side of the debate were eventually the winning side. However, further careful probing begins to reveal significant differences.

The Mu'tazilites, the Islamic theological school that emphasized the role of human reason and agency and thrived for several centuries before virtually dying out in the eleventh century of the Christian era, argued against the notion of an uncreated Qur'an because they believed it threatened the fundamental Islamic conviction of tawhid, the absolute unity of God. For them, Allah and the Qur'an sounded suspiciously like shirk. (Similarly, one of Arius's motives was to protect the doctrine of God's unity.) They argued that because the Qur'an's ontological status rested in the realm of created things, it participated in the realities of historical situatedness and linguistic ambiguity. This in turn demanded a far more explicit recognition, if not celebration, of the role of reason in the act of interpreting the qur'anic text. Remarkably unusual in the history of Muslim thought, the Mu'tazilites did not shy away from the creaturely nature of the Qur'an, and the necessarily human element of interpreting the Qur'an, even as they affirmed its status as divine revelation. If one extends the comparison to the fourth-century Christological debates, the Mu'tazilites championed something like an "Arian" view of the Qur'an.

The problem is that with the eventual eclipsing of Mu'tazilite teaching, the Qur'an came to be viewed in Muslim tradition simply as the perfect, utterly infallible, inerrant Word of God. The most vocal proponents of creaturely status for the Qur'an were effectively silenced—a development comparable to the rejection of Arius's Christology at Nicaea. Unlike Nicaea, however, no "fully God, fully human" paradox would be deemed necessary in traditional Islam. In this understanding of the Qur'an, the human element is effectively, even if not entirely, effaced. Revelation is unilateral; the human is passive recipient. I believe that this understanding of divine revelation creates ripple effects throughout the entire body of Muslim doctrine regarding God in relation to the world, and to human beings in particular. For instance, it implies a dismissal of any real or potential contribution of human reason—of interpretation—to knowledge of God or of the world. As I suggested in chapter 5, such an approach surely undercuts the scientific endeavor to understand and "name" our world. Further, as I argued in chapter 12, on the question of eschatological hope the Muslim approach tends to assign to God the role of Sole Actor, determining all things. Creaturely agency goes largely, if not entirely, unacknowledged.

In the Christological controversy of the fourth century, by contrast, the church's endeavor on the whole was to find a way to affirm that in the person of Jesus Christ the truly divine nature and the truly human nature unite without compromising the integrity essential to each. The divine does not overwhelm or negate the human; the human does not eclipse or compromise the divine. Thus, while the Council of Nicaea rejected Arius's teaching that the preexistent Son was a high and mighty creature of God—insisting instead that the Son was homoousias or "one nature" with the Father—it also sought to uphold the incarnate Son's authentic humanity. This became evident when, after the victory of the Athanasian party at Nicaea, Athanasius's own friend and theological heir Apollinaris pushed harder and more explicitly than had his mentor to offer a solution to the divine-human paradox. I have had occasion several times already to mention Apollinaris's Christology because its official rejection at the Council of Constantinople in 381 is crucial to this book's argument. Apollinaris seems not to have differed significantly from Athanasius; it is possible that his first mistake lay simply in being more explicit in his Christological formulations. He postulated that while Christ did truly have a human body (a strike against Gnostic, docetic Christology), in the place of Jesus's "rational soul" or human mind there dwelled the eternal, uncreated Logos. Analogically, this would imply that just as the Logos moved and controlled the shell that was Jesus's human body, so also God moves and controls what otherwise looks like creaturely agency in the world.

It is truly good news that the church recognized this for the dangerous heresy it was (and is). The great Cappadocian theologian Gregory of Nazianzus responded to Apollinaris's Christology: "If anyone has put his trust in [Christ] as a man without a human mind, that person is himself really lacking a mind, and quite unworthy of salvation. For that which [the Logos] has not assumed he has not healed." If the incarnate Logos did not have a human mind and consciousness, then no human mind can possibly be redeemed. The Christian doctrine of salvation—the full-orbed healing of the whole human and indeed of all creation—depends upon the Logos's full identification with, and thorough participation in, creaturely reality. Happily, the church followed Gregory's argument against Apollinaris, and did it again in the seventh century's monothelite controversy. In that debate the church affirmed the truly human will of Jesus, opposing the popular notion that Jesus always very simply, automatically, and without exertion of moral effort performed the will of God precisely because only the divine will was operative in him. If we remember too that Christian leaders had decisively opposed early Gnostic interpretations of Jesus as a spiritual being who only appeared to have a physical body, we find a consistent Christological thread running through the history of the church's official theological reflection: at every turn, the church has affirmed that the preexistent Logos, which "was with God, and indeed was God" (John 1:1), truly "became flesh and lived among us" (1:14). Thus, the being of God is such that this One could, and did, become a genuine human being who participated fully in the creaturely constraints of space, time, body, culture, language, and history.

The crucial point, then, is that a Christian interpretation of God and God's activity in creation—whether we refer to the act of creating itself, or to revelation, or to salvation or eschatological expectation—should be unafraid and unashamed to acknowledge the role of human beings, or "the human element." A robust Christian humanism is rooted in the doctrines of creation and, even more deeply, the incarnation. This is not to deny or belittle the historical reality of an Islamic humanism' but to encourage its present flourishing even while soberly recognizing that Islam repudiates the incarnational logic that is endemic to a Christian affirmation of God's profound investment in divine-human collaboration.

A full appreciation of this theological vision of colaboring moves us, I believe, to resist the recurring temptation to demand closure, to formulate easy answers, to seek deliverance from ambiguity and the happy burden of interpretation which is our lot. It appears that we—Jews, Christians, Muslims, and many others from virtually countless religious traditions—shall continue to open, which means to reopen, the texts of Holy Writ and of the world in which we find ourselves. May we become faithful readers in the spirit of humble prayer.

Precisely in that 'spirit, I offer one more reading of the Bible and the Qur'an side by side. The closing biblical passage is the prayer that Jesus taught his disciples to pray. By its side there is a qur'anic prayer often described as the Muslim equivalent of the Lord's Prayer. It figures significantly in the five prayer sessions prescribed daily for faithful Muslims and also is recited in many other everyday blessings. Indeed, the Qur'an is opened to this prayer, for it is Surah 1; hence the appropriateness of its traditional title, Al-Fatihah, "The Opening." It is perhaps also noteworthy that the Arabic Qur'an—which is to say the true and only Qur'an—is read from right to left and thus, from the perspective of speakers and readers of Indo-European languages, from the "back" to the "front" of the book. So at least in terms of the material layout of the actual pages of the Qur'an, we have Al-Fatihab in the right place here. We close this book—or, again, we reopen it—with Islam's "Opening" prayer. In this opening that is a closing that is more truly a reopening, I shall dispense with theological commentary. May we simply pray:

The Bible: The Lord's Prayer	The Qur'an: The Opening
Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name.	In the Name of Allah, the Compassionate, the Merciful:
Your kingdom come. Your will be done,	Praise be to Allah, the Lord of the Worlds, the Compassionate, the Merciful,
on earth as it is in heaven.	Master of the Day of Judgment.
Give us this day our daily bread.	Only You do we worship, and only You do we implore for help.
And forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors.	Lead us to the right path,
And do not bring us to the time of trial,	the path of those You have favoured,
but rescue us from the evil one.	not those who have incurred Your wrath or have gone astray.
Amen.	Amin.

The Qur'an and Its Biblical Subtext  by Gabriel Said Reynolds (Routledge Studies in the Qur'an) This book challenges the dominant scholarly notion that the Qur'an must be interpreted through the medieval commentaries shaped by the biography of the prophet Muhammad, proposing instead that the text is best read in light of Christian and Jewish scripture. The Qur'an, in its use of allusions, depends on the Biblical knowledge of its audience. However, medieval Muslim commentators, working in a context of religious rivalry, developed stories that separate Qur'an and Bible, which this book brings back together.

In a series of studies involving the devil, Adam, Abraham, Jonah, Mary, and Muhammad among others, Reynolds shows how modern translators of the Qur'an have followed medieval Muslim commentary and demonstrates how an appreciation of the Qur'an's Biblical subtext uncovers the richness of the Qur'an's discourse. Presenting unique interpretations of thirteen different sections of the Qur'an based on studies of earlier Jewish and Christian literature, the author substantially re-evaluates Muslim exegetical literature. Thus The Qur'an and Its Biblical Subtext, a work based on a profound regard for the Qur'an's literary structure and rhetorical strategy, poses a substantial challenge to the standard scholarship of Qur'anic Studies. With an approach that bridges early Christian history and Islamic origins, the book will appeal not only to students of the Qur'an but to students of the Bible, religious studies, and Islamic history.

The present work is largely a response to the difficulties that scholars have in explaining large parts of the Qur'an. Scholarly difficulties are nothing strange, of course, but there is something particularly intriguing about this case. For the most part, scholars of the Qur'an accept the basic premise of the medieval Islamic sources that the Qur'an is to be explained in light of the life of the Prophet Muhammad. The life of the Prophet, meanwhile, is recorded in those sources with intricate detail. This detailed information, one might assume, should allow scholars to explain at least the literal meaning of the Qur'an without difficulty. But it does not.

Perhaps the most salient example of this problem is the work of William Montgomery Watt. In his books Muhammad at Mecca and Muhammad at Medina,' Watt, following Islamic sources, provides details on every aspect of the Prophet's life, from his family, to his relations with his neighbors and friends, to his military and diplomatic strategies. Yet in his book Bell's Introduction to the Qur'an Watt consistently notes how much is unknown about the Qur'an, from the chronological order of its proclamation, to the mysterious letters that open 29 Sams, to obscure vocabulary throughout the text.'- The method of reading the Qur'an through the life of the Prophet seems not to have served Watt well. Nevertheless, Watt and other scholars argue (or, in some cases, assume) that the Qur'an must be viewed through the lens of Muhammad's biography. For Watt this is not one method of reading the text; it is the only method.

The present work is meant as a challenge to this state of affairs, at least in part. This is not a work of history and I will not examine, let alone rewrite, the biography of the Prophet. My concern is only to develop a fruitful method of reading the Qur'an. And yet the Qur'an is not a text that renders its secret easily. There is, as has often been noted, nothing that approaches a true narrative in the Qur'an, the story of Joseph (Q 12) notwithstanding. Instead the Qur'an seems to direct the reader, through allusions and references, to certain traditions which provide the basis for appreciating its message. The Qur'an awakens the audience's memory of these traditions and then proceeds without pause to deliver its religious message. This means, in other words, that the task of reading the Qur'an is a task of listening and response. The audience must follow the Qur'an's lead to some subtext of traditions.

This dynamic is raised by Salwa El-Awa in a recent article. She comments, "If recipients of the Qur'anic text lack access to the knowledge they need to process the meanings of its language, they are unlikely to succeed in uncovering the intended meanings."' El-Awa proceeds to illustrate her point with reference to al-masad (Q 111), wherein the Qur'an rebukes a man named "father of flame" (abu lahab) along with this man's wife. The proper explanation of this chapter, she insists, is found among those medieval Muslim exegetes who explain it by describing a confrontation that Muhammad had in Mecca with an uncle named Abu Lahab. And yet she adds that this explanation is not obvious in the Qur'an itself: "If information about the historical situation is not available to interpreters, the meaning of the whole sura may be turned into an image of man and his female partner being punished in hellfire for their disbelief."

Thus El-Awa follows faithfully the manner in which the medieval exegetes use biographical material to explain the Qur'an. I, on the other hand, will argue below (see Ch. 1) for the very position which she is relieved to avoid, that the Sura is "an image of man and his female partner being punished in hellfire for their disbelief."

Accordingly, the general argument in the present work is that the connection made by medieval Muslim exegetes between the biography of Muhammad and the Qur'an should not form the basis of critical scholarship. Instead, the Qur'an should be appreciated in light of its conversation with earlier literature, in particular Biblical literature (by which I mean the Bible, apocrypha, and Jewish and Christian exegetical works). This argument necessarily involves an examination of both the relationship of Muslim exegetical literature to the Qur'an and the relationship of the Qur'an to Biblical literature. Still it is the latter relationship that is of particular importance to me, since ultimately I will argue that the Qur'an expects its audience to be familiar with Biblical literature. Whereas both Islamic tradition and the tradition of critical scholarship have tended to separate Qur'an and Bible, the Qur'an itself demands that they be kept together.

The idea that the Qur'an and Biblical literature are related is not a new one. Indeed there is a long tradition of critical scholarship dedicated to the search for sources of the Qur'an in earlier Jewish and Christian writings. Yet for the most part the scholars who contributed to this tradition took for granted the connection made by medieval Muslim scholars between the biography of Muhammad and the Qur'an. In their search for sources, they tended to ask when, where, and how Muhammad learned something from Biblical literature. In other words, these scholars generally assume that the Prophet, as it were, stood between the Bible and the Qur'an.

The link between the Qur'an and the Prophet's biography, or sira (by which I mean not only works by this title but biographical information on Muhammad generally), was generally taken for granted from the beginning of European scholarship of the Qur'an.' The three most prominent translations of the Qur'an in eighteenth-century Europe all include a biographical sketch of the Prophet Muhammad.' The 1833 prize-winning work of Abraham Geiger, Was hat Mohammed aus dem Judenthume aufgenommen, includes frequent references to details of the Prophet's biography.' From its beginnings, in other words, the method of reading the Qur'an through that biography was a sine qua non of European scholarship on the Qur'an.

This method reached its most famous formulation in Die Geschichte des Qorans, a book in three volumes which evolved over seventy years, through the efforts of four different authors: Theodore Nöldeke, Friedrich Schwally, Gotthelf Bergstrasser, and Otto Pretzl. The earliest form of the Geschichte was a 1856 Latin essay by Nöldeke: De origine et compositione Surarum Qoranicarum ipsiusque Qorani.Nöldeke submitted this essay to a competition hosted by the Académie des inscriptions et belles-lettres of Paris, a competition that asked participants to "determiner autant qu'il est possible, avec l'aide des historiens arabes et des commentateurs et d'après l'examen des morceaux [coraniques] eux-mêmes, les moments de la vie de Mahomet auxquels ils se rapportent." In other words, the competition to which Nöldeke submitted his work involved the assumption that a critical study of the Qur'an means matching individual passages ("morceaux") of the Qur'an with elements of the Prophet's biography.

Nöldeke's work, which would become the first volume of Geschichte des Qorans, is in fact almost completely taken up by a critical arrangement of the Suras of the Qur'an into four periods of the Prophet's life: 1st Meccan, 2nd Meccan, 3rd Meccan and Medinan. Nöldeke adopted the system of four periods from Gustav Weil,' but the idea that each Sara, as a unity, can be placed in a certain moment of the Prophet's life is a tenet of Islamic religious tradition.' On the other hand, this idea is in no way obvious from the text of the Qur'an. The text itself nowhere demands to be arranged according to the life experiences of an individual.'

Yet this idea had its attraction. The scholars of Nöldeke's era believed that the Prophet's biography, when read critically, was a reliable source of historical information.' It therefore seemed an optimal place to begin a critical study of the Qur'an, a text that is often not forthcoming with contextual details. Thereby scholars were able, for example, to explain Biblical material in the Qur'an through reports in the Prophet's biography that connect him or his followers to Jews and Christians. In this way Aloys Sprenger argues, on the basis of the reports in Islamic literature that the Prophet met a Christian monk (named Bahira) during a childhood journey to Syria, that Muhammad had a Christian informant. Nöldeke devoted an article to the refutation of Sprenger's theory, but tellingly he pursues this refutation only by pointing to other elements in the Prophet's biography (such as Muhammad's relationship with Waraqa b. Nawfal) that render superfluous the search for a secret informant." This Nöldeke does even while he acknowledges the questionable authority of such reports, admitting that "der einzige unver-fälschte, durchaus zuverlassige Zeuge fiber Muhammad and seine Lehre ist der Qur'an."

The present work is built around the following chapter, which consists of case studies on individual Qur'anic passages. Each case study is divided into three sections: Qur'an, interpreters, subtext. In the first section I present the passage at hand on the basis of Qur'anic material alone. In the second section I describe the attempts of modern translators and classical mufassirun to understand that passage. In the third section I analyze that passage in the light of the Qur'anic subtext, that is, the larger literary and religious tradition in which the Qur'an is participating. Thereby I hope to show how the Qur'an itself depends on the reader's knowledge of that subtext for the expression of its own religious message.

The format of the case studies is inspired in part by a short article by Franz Rosenthal entitled "Some minor problems in the Qur'an."" Therein Rosenthal analyzes three disputed lexical items in the Qur'an: al-jizya 'an yad (Q 9.29), al-samad (Q 112.2), and al-shaytan al-rajim (Q 3.36; 15.34; 16.98; 38.77). The method in his analysis of al-samad seems to me particularly fruitful. Rosenthal describes the Qur'anic context of al-samad, then the debates among the mufassirun over the term and various modern translations of it (in fact forty-six different translations, according to him a "brief survey"). Finally Rosenthal turns to a philological study, presenting first the meaning of the root s.m.d. in other Semitic languages, and then the use of this root in the Bible (Numbers 25.3; Psalm 106.28). This method both respects the efforts of the mufassirun and modern translators, and highlights the virtue of appreciating the Qur'an's literary and historical context.

A second inspiration for this format is that of Speyer in his Die biblischen Erzählungen im Qoran. Speyer presents his detailed analysis of the Biblical material in the Qur'an in a series of studies that follow a Biblical sequence, that is, he begins with the Pentateuch (the creation of the world, Adam, and so forth), then the Deuteronomic history (including David, Solomon, and so forth) and concludes with the prophets. For each individual study Speyer begins with an overview of the Qur'anic material ("Die qoranische Darstellung") and then turns to an analysis of the Biblical background to individual elements of that material. In these two respects my method is similar to that of Speyer. On the other hand Speyer never concerns himself with tafsir. This I find fully justifiable, although it renders awkward his decision (mentioned above) to identify each Qur'anic passage with a certain period of the Prophet's life.

Meanwhile, Speyer's work approaches a comprehensive analysis of Biblical material in the Qur'an and thus is vastly more exhaustive than the present study. The achievement of Die biblischen Erzählungen im Qoran is perhaps best described by (none other than) Franz Rosenthal, who edited the work in the midst of the turmoil (and, in Prof. Rosenthal's case, personal risk) of late 1930s Germany, Speyer himself having died at the age of 38 in 1935. In 1993 Rosenthal noted that Speyer's work "is still the most comprehensive and detailed work to deal with the Jewish, Christian, also the Gnostic and Samaritan, parallels to the biblical material in the Qur'an." Speyer's work is a monument. My work is an exercise.

Still the thirteen studies that I include in this work are meant to be comprehensive in a more limited sense; that is, they represent a wide range of topics and a number of different literary forms found within the Qur'an. The case studies address the Qur'anic accounts of characters including Adam, Satan, Abraham, Haman, Jonah, Mary, and the Companions of the Cave. Still other case studies, such as that on ghulf or muhammad, involve the study of a single word, and yet still demonstrate that the Qur'an is in conversation with a larger literary tradition. Thus the case studies are meant to be diverse enough, in content and form, to make the point that the issue at hand is not a few idiosyncratic Qur'anic passages. There are, of course, certain types of Qur'anic passages — notably legal material — that find no place here. They are missing only because of constraints of space and time. Whether or not such passages can be read in light of a Biblical subtext will have to be the subject of a future study. I suspect they can.

As for the present work, in the first section of each individual case study I generally present the Qur'anic material at issue according to the 1924 Cairo Qur'an edition, which has today become the standard text. I am not fully satisfied with this presentation, inasmuch as it gives the impression that the Cairo edition is a critical edition. In fact, the Cairo edition only came into being when the Egyptian government, having received complaints of the divergences between the versions of the Qur'an being used in various secondary schools, appointed a committee to establish a standard text for Egyptian government schools." The task of this committee was not to establish the most ancient form of the Qur'an through the investigation of early Qur'an manuscripts. Instead it sought to establish a text on the basis of one of the canonical gird& (lit. "readings") of the Qur'an, namely that of Hafs (d. 180/796) an `Asim (d. 127/745). Yet the very idea of gird& is the product of later Islamic tradition. It was developed and sponsored, most famously by Ibn Mujahid (d. 324/936)," in response to the disagreements over the shape of the Qur'anic text in the third and fourth Islamic centuries.

In other words, the 1924 Cairo Qur'an edition is the product of school administration, on the one hand, and religious tradition on the other. Nevertheless, due to the religious prestige of Egypt the Cairo edition eventually became almost ubiquitous in the Islamic world. In response western scholars took to using this text as well, and Gustav Flügel's 1834 edition, which had previously been the standard text of western scholarship, gradually became obsolete. My use of this edition in the case studies, then, is essentially a matter of convenience for author and reader.

In the first section of the case studies certain words, which are transliterations and not translations, are italicized. These are terms which are the center of scholarly dispute, for which reason I postpone translating them until the final section of the case study, where their meaning becomes evident in the light of the Qur'an's subtext. Other words, which are translations, are underlined. These are terms for which I present the standard translation in the first section, for the sake of comparison, and a new translation in the final section.

Finally, I do not concern myself with variae lectiones in the first section of the case studies. Since I conclude that these variations are largely a product of exegetical speculation (a point that will be emphasized in the third chapter), I assign them to the history of the text and not its origin. In other words, since the gird& belong to the study of tafsir and not of the Qur'an, they enter into the case studies only in the second section.

In that section I present the interpretations, when appropriate, of a number of modern Qur'an translations, along with those of a select number of classical mufassirun. Neither element is intended to be a comprehensive survey. Instead in both cases I have attempted to isolate a small yet diverse group of scholars.

In all I refer to seven different modern Qur'an translations. The earliest is that of Marmeduke, later Muhammad, Pickthall (d. 1936, translation published 1930), the English son of an Anglican priest and convert to Islam. Pickthall's translation, which was for much of the mid-twentieth century the most popular English translation of the Qur'an, occasionally reflects his knowledge of the Bible. Elsewhere, however, it seems to reflect an effort to summarize Islamic exegesis (for example, he translates one word, al-samad [Q 112.2], as "the eternally Besought of all.").

Whereas Pickthall was an Englishman who composed his translation in India (it was commissioned by the Muslim governor of Hyderabad), Abdullah Yusuf Ali (d. 1953, translation published 1938) was an Indian who composed his translation in England. Yusuf Ali was an Ismalli Shri, a fact that has led certain Muslims to question the orthodoxy of his translation. Meanwhile, that translation tends distinctly towards modernism, especially on topics relating to human rights, the treatment of women, slavery, and war. In a review article, Arthur Jeffery presents Yusuf Ali's perspective as an apologetical response to Christianity," a not unreasonable presentation in light of the frequent comparisons that Yusuf Ali makes in his footnotes to show the superiority of Islam to Christianity. Yusuf Ali's original translation was later edited by a Saudi-sponsored committee. It is the Saudi version which has been widely published today (with funding from missionary organizations). In the present work, however, I refer to Yusuf Ali's original translation. That translation tends to reflect piety more than philology." Perhaps because of this Yusuf Ali generally preserves the word order and the sentence structure of the Arabic text, producing at times long and awkward English sentences.

Like Pickthall, Yusuf Ali presents the translation as a single, continuous text. Neither translator ever indicates uncertainty (although Yusuf All regularly resorts to parenthetical additions in order to clarify his intention), suggests any emendations to the text, or provides anything approaching an apparatus criticus. The effect is of a text that is perfectly well understood.

The French translation of Regis Blachère (d. 1973, translation published 1949), on the other hand, is quite different. Blachère, like Richard Bell (d. 1952, translation published 1937) before him, shows great interest in both the literary forms and the redaction of the Qur'an. Thus Blachère regularly sets texts off to the right, or places texts in italics, in order to indicate passages which he believes were added to the Qur'an at a later date. In places where Blachère believes that two different versions of the same passage have been joined in the process of redaction he divides the text into two parallel columns. Thus Blachère's translation is a work of critical, if speculative, philological revision.

The German translation of Rudi Paret (d. 1983, translation published 1962) is likewise critical and philological but in a different manner. Paret generally accepts the Cairo edition as the textus receptus, and does not seek to identify layers of the Qur'anic text. Yet he shows interest in both the etymology of Qur'anic vocabulary and the religious symbolism thereof. In his translation Paret also demonstrates a rare quality: candor. Paret, unlike all of the other translators in my survey, acknowledges when he is uncertain of his translation with the addition of question marks in parentheses.

The translation of Arthur John Arberry (d. 1969, translation published 1955), on the other hand, reflects still another approach to the text." Arberry, a professor of Arabic and Persian at Cambridge, sought above all to produce an English translation that demonstrates the formal and rhetorical qualities of the Arabic Qur'an. For this reason Arberry's translation continues to be popular among Muslim and non-Muslim scholars who are concerned with the appreciation of the Qur'an as scripture (although Arberry's translation is rendered cumbersome by his use of Rage's verse divisions, and by the provision of numbers only every five verses).

Finally, the most recent translations in my survey, that of Fakhry (published 1996) and Abdel Haleem (published 2004) are chosen above all as examples of recent trends in translating the Qur'an. Unlike Yusuf Ali, neither Fakhry nor Abdel Haleem introduce or frame their work as expressions of Islamic tradition or piety. On the contrary, they both claim to provide the original meaning of the text, arrived at through critical evaluation. Abdel Haleem, for example, declares, "It is the job of the translator to bring his or her reader as close as is possible to the meaning of the original Arabic, utilizing the tools of solid linguistic analysis and looking at it in the context of its own stylistic features."" Accordingly the works of Fakhry and Abdel Haleem seem to offer reasonable standards with which to compare my own attempts at the study of the Qur'an in the present work.

Yet the majority of the second section of my case studies is focused not on modern translations but rather on medieval mufassirun. Even then I work with a limited group of tafsirs, since my aim is not to present a catalog of traditional Islamic interpretation but only to present evidence for my argument about the relationship of Qur'an and tafsir. Accordingly I have chosen five different medieval tafsirs with the aim of representing different periods as well as diverse sectarian and theological perspectives. The earliest tafsir in my survey is that attributed to Muqatil b. Sulayman (d. 150/767), but extant only in the recension of Abu Salt Hudhayl b. Habib (d. after 190/805; and then on the authority of Abdallah b. Thabit, d. 315/927)." In light of questions surrounding its authenticity, I refer to the text as Tafsir Muqatil, to indicate the status of Muqatil as the authority, but not the ultimate author, thereof.

The tafsir attributed to Abu l-Hasan Ibrahim al-Qummi (d. after 307/919) was likewise subjected to later revision, but it can be traced to the author with greater confidence." Qummi was an Imaini (Twelver) Shii from Qumm (as his name suggests), whose father was a companion of 'Ali b. al-Rida (d. 202/818), the 8th imam." Qummi's tafsir is an important example of early Shri interpretation. However, unlike other early Shri mufassirun, he does not limit himself to those verses that are the traditional objects of Shi'i exegesis on the Imamate.

The commentary of Abu Ja`far al-Tabari (d. 310/923), is the cardinal work of early Sunni exegesis. Tabari's work has little need of introduction, and my choice thereof has little need of justification. Still I might add that unlike Tafsir Muqatil and Qummi, Tabari is concerned in a fundamental way with the recording and analysis of earlier exegetical traditions (a method later referred to as tafsir bi-l-ma'thur), even if he regularly introduces his own contributions to the conversation. Tabari's tafsir also appears more comprehensive in his application of other elements, including qira'at, Jahili poetry, and grammatical analysis, to the commentary on individual passages."

The work of Muhammad al-Zamakhshari (d. 538/1144) is different. Himself a Mu`tazili mutakallim, Zamakhshari is fundamentally concerned with an exegesis that is rational (a method later referred to as tafsir bi-l-ra'y). While he cites the views of earlier scholars, and indeed prophetic hadtth, Zamakhshari generally puts such citations at the service of his rational arguments. Zamakhshari attempts to interpret the data of revelation in a manner that is compatible with the axioms of Mu`tazili theology, beginning with the oneness and justness of God, the latter point involving human free will.

The last tafsir in our survey, that of Ibn Kathir (d. 774/1373), is far removed from the rationalism of the Mu'tazila. Ibn Kathir, a Shari from Damascus, was strongly influenced by his Hanbali teacher Ibn Taymiyya (d. 728/1328), who emphasized revelation above reason, and warned against the dangers of innovative and speculative rationalism. Accordingly, Ibn Kathir insists that the proper litmus test for the data of revelation in the Qur'an is the data of revelation in the hadith. This insistence means, of course, that order had to be made out of the mass of hadith and isnads, for which reason Ibn Kathir counts on `ilm al-rijal, or the study of transmitters and their isnads, to identify authentic reports. In this Ibn Kathir's approach is the furthest from Tafsir Muqatil not only in time, but also in method."

These five tafsirs hardly make for an exhaustive survey, especially since there are places in the case studies where one or more of the tafsirs have no significant material to add to the question at hand. It is also worth noting that Qur'anic exegesis is not limited to works properly known as tafsirs, but can also be found, for example, in qisas al-anbiya' ("stories of the prophets"), and in the classical Sunni hadith collections (and indeed in most Islamic sciences, including history, jurisprudence, and so on). Yet in the second section of the case studies my aim is not to be exhaustive but only to establish the main trends in the classical tafsirs. Thereby I intend to create a background against which the reader can judge the third section of the case studies, which is dedicated to the Qur'an's relationship to pre-Islamic literature.

Here it is appropriate to add that I do not place Jahn' (so-called "pre-Islamic") poetry in this latter category. This is, I acknowledge, not a position that can be taken for granted, and therefore I will add some brief comments in its defense." The basic point, of course, is that not a single line of Jahili poetry comes from a book written by a Jahili Arab. Instead the entire corpus is found in the works of Muslim scholars who lived long after the supposed society of Jahiliyya had ceased to exist. And notably the earliest tafsirs, such as Tafsir Muqatil, have no recourse to Jahili poetry whatsoever."

Thus the situation is strikingly analogous to the question of hadIth. Few critical scholars today would comfortably accept hadith, even those in the sihah, to be literal quotations of something said about 150 years earlier in the Hijaz. Presumably scholars should then feel even less comfortable about accepting the historicity of Jahili poetry, since much of it is supposed to date even before the time of the Prophet. Imru' al-Qays, for example, the most famous Jahili poet, is said to have died around the year 550, yet a written version of his famous poems in the Mu'allaqat cannot be dated before the time of Asma'i (d. 213/828). Other cases are still more striking. The poet Zuhayr b. Abi Sulma is also supposed to have lived in the sixth century, but his poems are extant only in the collection of al-A`lam al-Shantamari (d. 476/1083). In light of this it is strange to read contemporary scholarship in which the historical nature of Jahili poetry is described with great confidence."

Meanwhile, the historical discrepancy between the supposed poets and the recording of their poetry is only one reason to doubt the antiquity of Jahili poetry. No less important is the evidence of material in the poems themselves, as Ignaz Goldziher observes:

Es ist eine wahre Plage far alle jene, die bei der Betrachtung dieser Verhältnisse auf die überlieferung der altarabischen Poesie angewiesen sind, daB die Entscheidung der Frage nach der Echtheit oder Unechtheit der in Betracht kommendem Stellen — ganz abgesehen von Daten, deren apokrypher Charakter aus inneren Gründen auf der Hand liegt — oft nur auf den subjektiven Eindruck gestellt ist, den die fraglichen Gedichte auf den Beobachter machen.

Jahili poetry often seems too good to be true; that is, it seems to reflect knowledge of the Qur'an itself. Nevertheless a number of modern scholars explain the Qur'an by citing this poetry (much as the mufassirun once did)." Haim Hirschberg, for example, bases his analysis of the Qur'an on evidence in Jahili poetry for the religious ideas of Arabs at the rise of Islam." Hirschberg himself notes that it is peculiar to find so much Biblical and Qur'anic material in Jahili poetry, and yet so few traces of paganism. Jahili poetry, after all, is supposedly the product par excellence of a pagan culture.

The most well-known case illustrating the problem of Jahili poetry is that of Umayya b. Abi 1-Salt, a poet who is described in the Islamic sources as a hanif from the city of Wit' and a contemporary of the Prophet." Umayya's poems are distinguished both by references to Biblical narratives and by Qur'anic vocabulary. In an article entitled "Une nouvelle source du Qoran," Clèment Huart accordingly argues that these poems provide scholars with a clear literary source for the material in the Qur'an.'°' Yet the matter can hardly be this simple. The earliest recorded compilation of Umayya's poems is that of Muhammad b. Habib, who died in 244/859, about 250 years after the supposed death of Umayya. Moreover, these poems seem to reflect not only the Qur'an, but even tafsir. Most scholars, therefore, objected to Huart's thesis. Andrae notes "la dependence manifest du poète a règard du Coran." Nöldeke argues that material in Umayya's poems which closely reflects Qur'anic expressions should be seen as a later forgery.' More recently Franz-Christoph Muth has shown the danger of using Jahili poetry to explain Qur'anic hapax legomena.' In light of all this it seems to me best not to assume that Jahili poetry is pre-Islamic poetry. The proper assumption is that proposed by Alphonse Mingana, that the Qur'an is the first Arabic book."

More generally it seems to me that scholars need not feel compelled to read the Qur'an in light of a pagan culture that would have produced this poetry. The premise that the Qur'an emerged amidst paganism has more than once left scholars confused by the fact that paganism is hardly evident in the Qur'an. Rudolph, for example, writes:

Es fällt immer wieder auf, wie weniges im Qoran an das arabische Heidentum erinnert. In der ganzen mekkanischen Zeit findet sich in ihm nichts Heidnisches, abgesehen vom Glauben an die Dämonen (jinn), von der nicht zu leugnenden, aber freilich nur ganz vorübergehenden Anerkennung der drei Göttinen mat, Manat und al-'Uzza in S. 53 und von der einmaligen positive Erwähnung des Opfers in der frühmekkanischen.

Jeffery, arguing that even Rudolph overestimates the evidence of Arab paganism in the Qur'an, comments, "It comes, therefore, as no little surprise, to find how little of the religious life of this Arabian paganism is reflected in the pages of the Qur'an.'

Yet the notion of the pagan background to the Qur'an has hardly gone away. In his 1936 article "Die Orginalität des arabischen Propheten", Johann Hick criticizes the efforts of scholars in his day to connect the Qur'an to Biblical literature)" Toufiq Fand presents the pagan background to Islam in his 1968 work Le Pantheon de l' Arable centrale a la veille de l'hegire." Later (1984) Alfred Beeston would claim to discover evidence for the development of an indigenous Arab monotheism (which he connects with the reports of the hanifs in Islamic sources) in South Arabian inscriptions."'

In the present work my study of the Qur'an is not based at all on a historical context, whether pagan, Jewish, or Christian. Accordingly this work is not an investigation into the sources of the Qur'an. This search was often the explicit goal of earlier studies, as indicated by the titles of Abraham Geiger's Was hat Mohammed aus dem Judenthume aufgenommen and Clement Huart's "Une nouvelle source du Qoran." As Geiger's title suggests, this idea was usually connected to the historical principle that Muhammad was the sole author of the Qur'an. This principle, meanwhile, was often shaded with the conviction that a merchant from an obscure corner of the Arabian Peninsula was incapable of composing narratives on Biblical themes. Thus Muhammad was usually assumed to have borrowed material from Jews and Christians. The Qur'an consequently was seen as something of a scrapbook of earlier religious ideas.

As I see it this pejorative approach to the Qur'an was in large part a product of the historical optimism of nineteenth-century modernists, and in particular of their trust in the received biography of the Prophet. That biography goes to great lengths to emphasize Muhammad's pagan context. Thereby it emphasizes the divine origin of the Qur'an, by having Muhammad far away from the traditional centers of Judaism and Christianity, in a city that was the last, proud metropolis of paganism. It even has the Prophet reared by a (pagan) Bedouin foster mother in middle of the desert. The acceptance of this biography as history led scholars to believe that Muhammad could not have written the Qur'an without help from the Jews and Christians whom he would later meet. It might be added, however, that behind this approach also lies the purely polemical portrayal of Muhammad in premodern European writings, according to which he was no prophet but rather the protégé of a heretical Nestorian monk."' This approach is, of course, totally incompatible with the views I have introduced above on the problems of reading the Qur'an through sira.

It still might be contended that sources for the Qur'an can be pursued even if Muhammad is not assumed to be its author. It may be enough to take a textual approach, comparing the Qur'an with earlier works, in order to identify its sources. To this contention I have two objections. First, we have no pre-Qur'anic Arabic literature, if any ever existed. This means, as I see it, that we cannot generally claim that the Qur'an itself has borrowed foreign vocabulary, having no way to know whether this vocabulary entered into Arabic long before. Presumably the same must be said about texts and traditions.

Second, the Qur'an's literary style is evidently allusive. The Qur'an does not seem to quote texts, Biblical or otherwise, at all. Instead the Qur'an alludes to them as it develops a unique religious message. The Qur'an thus is one part of a dynamic and complicated literary tradition, marked not by strict borrowing but by motifs, topoi, and exegesis.

Accordingly I introduce in the following chapter the idea of the Qur'an's subtext. By this I mean the collection of traditions that the Qur'an refers to in its articulation of a new religious message. The key, then, is not what sources entered into the Qur'an, but rather the nature of the relationship between the Qur'anic text and its Jewish and Christian subtext. For this reason I speak of the Qur'an in conversation with a larger literary tradition. The idea of the Qur'an's conversation is not meant as a substitute for the idea of the Qur'an's sources. It is meant to reflect the notion of the Qur'an as a homiletic text (an idea that I will develop in the final chapter of this work) animated by its allusions to, and interpretation of, its literary subtext.

So while research on the Qur'an cannot be limited to identifying its sources, it should not ignore the earlier literary and religious traditions to which the Qur'an consistently alludes. The student of the Qur'an should be always alert to the conversation that the Qur'an conducts with earlier texts, and in particular to its intimate conversation with Biblical literature. The case studies of the following chapter might be seen as an exercise in listening closely to that conversation.

Above I discuss briefly the problems in using Jahili poetry as an element of pre-Qur'anic literature. The question of dating can no less be ignored when it comes to Jewish and Christian literature. For the most part, however, the Jewish and Christian works that I turn to in the following chapter date from well before the period of Islamic origins. Such is the case for the canonical Bible, of course, but also for narrative works such as Jubilees (3rd-1st century Bc; a Jewish account of the revelation given to Moses on Mt. Sinai), the Life of Adam and Eve (ca. 1st century AD),' the Gospel of Bartholemew, the Apocalypse of Abraham (ca. 2nd century AD; a Jewish account of Abraham's rejection of idol-worship and reception of divine revelation), the Gospel of Nicodemus (3rd or 4th century AD), and the Cave of Treasures (a Christian account of sacred history from Adam to Christ; 4th-6th century AD). Pre-Qur'anic as well are the works of Philo (d. ca. AD 50), Josephus (d. AD 100), Ephraem (d. AD 373; although in his case close attention must be paid to the question of authenticity), and Jacob of Serugh (d. AD 521). So too the Babylonian Talmud, which reached its final form (for all practical purposes) in the sixth century, can safely be counted pre-Qur'anic.

However, the question of Jewish midrashic works and targums is more complicated. The great collection Midrash Rabba, for example, contains works from a wide variety of dates. Genesis Rabba, which dates from the fifth Christian century (ca. 450), is quite clearly pre-Qur'anic, but most other volumes, including Exodus Rabba (11th-12th century) and Numbers Rabba (12th century) are post-Qur'anic. Leviticus Rabba and Ecclesiastes Rabba date from around the period of the Qur'an's origins, but they play no major role in the present work. Esther Rabba is a compilation of two works, one (Esther 1, covering the Book of Esther, chs. 1-2) quite early (early 6th century) and one (Esther 2, covering Esther 3-8) quite late (ca. 1 1 th century), but it likewise plays no major role in the present work.

Other Rabbinic works must be evaluated individually. The Mekilta de-Rabbi Shimfon b. Yohai, a commentary on Exodus at once haggadic and halakhic, is quite early, dating from the early Amoraic period (probably 3rd-4th century AD). More problematic is the evaluation of other Jewish works which reached their final form around the period of Islamic origins. The Pirqe de-Rabbi Eli'ezer, for example, was likely written in the eighth century and in places contains clear reflections of an Arab and Islamic historical context (esp. chs. 30, 32, in regard to Abraham, Hagar, and Ismail). However, in other places it no less clearly preserves more ancient material.

The question of the Hebrew Pirqe de-Rabbi Eli'ezer's date is closely related to the question of the Aramaic Targum Pseudo-Jonathan's date. The two works share common material, but the direction of influence between the two works is a matter of scholarly dispute. The predominant scholarly view is that Pirqe de-Rabbi Eli'ezer is earlier and influenced the Targum of Pseudo-Jonathan.' Robert Hayward, however, argues that Pseudo-Jonathan is the earlier text; indeed he suggests that it is pre-Islamic.' James Kugel, while acknowledging that there are some post-Islamic references in Pseudo-Jonathan, argues that the basis of the work "goes back far earlier."' In light of this scholarly debate, which I have no authority to judge, it seems that caution should be exercised in using these two sources in a study of the Qur'an. Accordingly, I include information from the Pirqe de-Rabbi Eli'ezer and the Targum of Pseudo-Jonathan only in footnotes, not in the main text. The question of the Aramaic Targum Neofiti, however, is quite different. It is of Palestinian provenance (whereas Pseudo-Jonathan is Babylonian) and was written well before the rise of Islam (ca. 1st century AD).

Consequently there is no reason to think that the Qur'an belongs any less to the Biblical tradition than the memrê do. If the Qur'an is rarely thought of in this manner this is due to the trend in critical scholarship to accept the connection made in the medieval Islamic sources between the biography of Muhammad and the Qur'an. Curiously enough this has been challenged recently in the Islamic world by the Syrian scholar Muhammad Shahrur.

Qur'an account of Joseph to women cutting themselves with knives (Q 12.31; nowhere to be found in the Biblical account) in light of a long tradition of Jewish speculation on the words akhar ha-debarim "after these things" in Genesis 39.7.1' In the Qur'an the appearance of knives in the hands of the women is a non sequitur. Yet in light of the midrashic account it makes sense.

Thereby Potiphar's wife, usually named Zuleika, passes out knives that the woman might peel oranges (or other fruit) served at her banquet." The knives, then, are a typical example of the Qur'an penchant for allusions." Meanwhile, the entire episode demonstrates the Qur'an's intimate involvement in the tradition of midrashic development of the Biblical text. In fact the Qur'an itself, in turn, seems to have exerted an influence on later Jewish exegesis. The Midrash ha-Gadol, for example, a post-Qur'anic work (14th century) that stems from Yemen, reflects the Qur'an's idiosyncratic sequencing of the Joseph account."° In a similar fashion to Kugel's work, the present work has repeatedly turned to Jewish and Christian midrash as a bridge to connect Bible and Qur'an.'"

It is telling that this sort of methodological approach to the Qur'an, where it is seen for its participation in both earlier and later renditions of the Joseph story, appears in the work of a scholar of Biblical Studies. When we turn to the Encyclopaedia of the Qur'an, the cardinal work of Qur'anic Studies, the approach to the Qur'an's account of Joseph is different.

In his article on Joseph, Shalom Goldman presents this account as though it emerged ex nihilo. There is no consideration whatsoever of its pre-history, or of the Qur'an's conversation with the midrashic tradition on the Joseph story. Instead Goldman turns directly to the opinions of mufassirun, namely (and in the following order) Thalabi (d. 427/1036), Baydawi (d. ca. 685/1286), and Tabari (d. 310/923). Thus there is no suggestion that the Qur'an itself points its audience to the Biblical narrative with allusions (such as the knives of Q 12.31); neither is there an indication of the motives that shaped the historical development of tafsir on this account. Instead the traditions of the mufassirun, in a seemingly synchronic way, are presented as the ultimate source for a critical understanding of it."' Thus neither the Qur'an nor tafsir receives critical attention.

This approach is found frequently in the Encyclopaedia of the Qur'an. In her article on Adam and Eve, Cornelia Schack mentions only the classical Islamic interpretations of the Adam story (cf. CS 1). In her article on Mary, Barbara Stowasser makes no mention of the subtext to which the Qur'an itself is alluding."' The story of the ordeal, which in light of the subtext is understood to relate to Mary's engagement to Joseph, is left to the speculation of the mufassirun. Indeed, time and again the Encyclopaedia of the Qur'an appears to be instead the Encyclopaedia of Tafsir. Of course, tafsir is an important subject of critical research and, in my opinion, deserves its own encyclopedia. Yet to reduce the study of the Qur'an to the study of tafsir is to do a discredit to both.

Perhaps it is for this reason that doctoral students of the Qur'an today are required to study Arabic (and modern European languages), and often Persian, but rarely Hebrew, Aramaic, Syriac, Ethiopic, Greek or Latin (let alone Ancient North/South Arabian), that is, the languages of the pre-Qur'anic Shahrur, however, only goes halfway: he challenges the use of medieval Islamic sources in reading the Qur'an, but does not consider the Qur'an's place in the Biblical tradition.'

Wansbrough goes all the way. The basic challenge raised by Wansbrough is not, as is often suggested, a point of history, that is, that the Qur'an was codified at a late date or that Islam developed in Mesopotamia. Instead the basic challenge raised by Wansbrough is a point of method, namely that critical scholars, instead of reading the Qur'an through tafsir, should read the Qur'an within a larger tradition of Biblical literature. Rippin notes accordingly:

So the question raised by some critics concerning whether it is accurate to view Islam as an extension of the Judeo-Christian tradition cannot be considered valid until the evidence and the conclusions put forth in Wansbrough's works have been weighed. The point must always be: Is the presupposition supported by the analysis of the data? To attack the presupposition as invalid is to miss the entire point. To evaluate the work one must participate within its methodological presuppositions and evaluate the final results.'

The present study is intended to show, on the one hand, how much our understanding of the Qur'an stands to gain from reading the text in light of its Biblical subtext and, on the other hand, that the Qur'an itself points us to this reading.'

The fruit of this approach is perhaps most evident in Max Grünbaum's 1893 work, Neue Beiträge zur semitischen Sagenkunde. Therein Grünbaum does through follow the precedent of Geiger, that is, he does not go through theQur'an passage by passage and search through earlier literature to find likely. Nor does he follow the precedent of Nöldeke et al., by explaining the Qur'an with constant reference to the sira. Instead Grünbaum proceeds narratives as they appear in Hebrew, Aramaic, Syriac, and Arabic (with occasional references to Greek and Latin versions) on the common protagonists of Jewish- Christian-Islamic tradition, from Adam to Solomon. He thus exhibits the remarkable conversation that the Qur'an conducts with the various texts of that tradition, along with the manner in which the mufassirun integrated Biblical traditions in their efforts to interpret the Qur'an. The pre- and post-history of each Qur'anic narrative thereby emerges, as does the degree to which the Qur'an has a cooperative relationship with Jewish and Christian texts. In comparison, an approach which ignores those texts appears to be severely lacking.

While Grünbaum wrote his work well over a hundred years ago, a small group of recent publications likewise are focused on the Qur'an's relationship with Biblical literature. Two different francophone scholars have recently published such works. The first is the Tunisian scholar Mondher Sfar, who shows a particular concern for the Qur'an's reception of Biblical traditions that evolved from Ancient Near East mythology.' The second is Michel Cuypers, whose work Le festin: Une lecture de la sourate al-Ma'ida is a close reading of the fifth chapter of the Qur'an. Therein Cuypers employs rhetorical analysis in order to uncover the strategies behind the Qur'an's turns of phrase and use of Biblical traditions."

Yet more similar to Grünbaum's work is James Kugel's In Potiphar's Therein Kugel examines the Qur'anic  account of Joseph as Potiphar's House. the larger midrashic tradition." Thus Kugel addresses the reference in the Judaeo-Christian tradition. In this regard our field has taken a great step backwards. Not only are students today not being trained to write philological works like those of Nöldeke, Grünbaum, Jeffery, and Speyer, very few of them are able to understand those works.

Yet on what grounds have contemporary scholars chosen to isolate the Qur'an from earlier literary and religious traditions? Of course, a religious Muslim might, quite legitimately, make such a choice on the basis of dogma, just as certain Christian religious scholars find critical studies of the Bible or the historical Jesus taboo, or certain Hindu scholars find critical studies of the Mahabharata taboo. If the professors of al-Azhar do not ask their students to study pre-Islamic languages or, for example, to read al-kahf (Q 18) in the light of the narratives of the Sleepers of Ephesus, they might be excused on dogmatic grounds. Yet do scholars at liberal universities dedicated to critical study enjoy the same excuse?

The present work has hopefully provided a modest example of how much is to be gained by making a different choice, by reading the Qur'an in the light of its Biblical subtext. With this method the depth and the skill of the Qur'an's allusions appear. With this method, moreover, it emerges that Qur'an and Bible, far from being incompatible or in opposition, are very much in harmony. In fact, this method demands that the student of the Qur'an be no less a student of the Bible. So too it has implications for the student of the Bible. The Qur'an can no longer be seen as a foreign or irrelevant book. It now appears as a work very much within the tradition of Biblical literature, and should be considered such at universities and seminaries alike.