The Judeo-Christian Origins of Islam
by Ibn Warraq
Part 8
Part 1 here; part 2 here; part 3 here; part 4 here; part 5 here, part 6 here, part 7 here.
B. OLD TESTAMENT.
The Koran has references to only the Pentateuch and the Pslams. Moses’ name appears 136 times in the Koran, allusions far exceeding “those relating to other figures of the Islamic history of salvation, including Abraham.”[Encyclopaedia of the Qur’an, Vol. 3, s.v. “Moses” p. 419]. Bearing in mind the importance of Moses in the Koran, Patricia Crone and Michael Cook in their important work, Hagarism, put forward the thesis that the influence of the Samaritans was perhaps the decisive factor in the creation of the Islamic identity. The origins of the Samaritans are rather obscure. They are Israelites of central Palestine, generally considered the descendants of those who were planted in Samaria by the Assyrian kings, in about 722 B.C.E. The faith of the Samaritans was Jewish monotheism, but they had shaken off the influence of Judaism by developing their own religious identity, rather in the way the Arabs were to do later on. The Samaritan canon included only the Pentateuch, which was considered the sole source and standard for faith and conduct. The formula “There is no God but the One” is an ever-recurring refrain in Samaritan liturgies. A constant theme in their literature is the unity of God and His absolute holiness and righteousness. We can immediately notice the similarity of the Muslim proclamation of faith: “There is no God but Allah.” And, of course, the unity of God is a fundamental principle in Islam. The Muslim formula “In the name of God” (bismillah) is found in Samaritan scripture as beshem. The opening chapter of the Koran is known as the Fatiha, opening or gate, often considered as a succinct confession of faith. A Samaritan prayer, which can also be considered a confession of faith, begins with the words: Amadti kamekha al fatah rahmeka, “I stand before Thee at the gate of Thy mercy.” Fatah is the Fatiha, opening or gate.
The sacred book of the Samaritans was the Pentateuch, which embodied the supreme revelation of the divine will, and was accordingly highly venerated. Muhammad also seems to know the Pentateuch and Psalms only, and shows no knowledge of the prophetic or historical writings.
The Samaritans held Moses in high regard, Moses being the prophet through whom the Law was revealed. For the Samaritans, Mt. Gerizim was the rightful center for the worship of Yahweh; and it was further associated with Adam, Seth, and Noah, and Abraham’s sacrifice of Isaac. The expectation of a coming Messiah was also an article of faith; the name given to their Messiah was the Restorer. Here we can also notice the similarity of the Muslim notion of the Mahdi. We can tabulate the close parallels between the doctrines of the SAMARITANS and the Muslims in this way:
MOSES, EXODUS, PENTATEUCH, MT. SINAI/MT. GERIZIM, SHECHEM
Muhammad, Hijra, Koran, Mt. Hira, Mecca
Under the influence of the Samaritans, the Arabs proceeded to cast Muhammad in the role of Moses as the leader of an exodus (hijra), as the bearer of a new revelation (Koran) received on an appropriate (Arabian) sacred mountain, Mt. Hira. It remained for them to compose a sacred book. Cook and Crone [CC] point to the tradition that the Koran had been many books but of which ‘Uthman (the third caliph after Muhammad) had left only one. We have the further testimony of a Christian monk who distinguishes between the Koran and the Surat al-baqara as sources of law. In other documents, we are told that Hajjaj (661–714), the governor of Iraq, had collected and destroyed all the writings of the early Muslims. Then, following Wansbrough, CC conclude that the Koran “is strikingly lacking in overall structure, frequently obscure and inconsequential in both language and content, perfunctory in its linking of disparate materials and given to the repetition of whole passages in variant versions. On this basis it can be plausibly argued that the book [Koran] is the product of the belated and imperfect editing of materials from a plurality of traditions.”
The Samaritans had rejected the sanctity of Jerusalem, and had replaced it by the older Israelite sanctuary of Shechem. When the early Muslims disengaged from Jerusalem, Shechem provided an appropriate model for the creation of a sanctuary of their own. The parallelism is striking. Each presents the same binary structure of a sacred city closely associated with a nearby holy mountain, and in each case the fundamental rite is a pilgrimage from the city to the mountain. In each case the sanctuary is an Abrahamic foundation, the pillar on which Abraham sacrificed in Shechem finding its equivalent in the rukn [the Yamai corner of the Ka‘ba] of the Meccan sanctuary. Finally, the urban sanctuary is in each case closely associated with the grave of the appropriate patriarch: Joseph (as opposed to Judah) in the Samaritan case, Ishmael (as opposed to Isaac) in the Meccan.
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Muhammad (or whoever wrote the Qur'an) probably was NOT influenced by the Samaritans only. The Qur'an admits Elijah (Ilyas), Elisha (Alyassa), Ezra (Uzair), and Jonah (Yunis) as prophets. Elijah's confrontation with the prophets of Ba'al (I Kings 18:17-40) gets a brief summary in Saffat (37:123-32); in the same Surah (verses 139-48), there is a similar summary of the story of Jonah. It's basically a poor man's version of Ecclesiasticus (Sirach) chapters 44-50, from the Old Testament Apocrypha; although stripped-down enough to make it more than likely that all of the material which the Surah Saffat and other parts of the Qur'an present were obtained by hearing rather than reading.
Further, the retention of Huddud punishments in Islam (amputation of the hand for theft) rather than the adoption of restoration (cf. Exodus 22) strongly suggests that whatever Muhammad and his first disciples learned from the Pentateuch, it was not seen as a guide for practical jurisprudence.
It's also clear that the first Muslims picked up some material from the Rabbinical Jews, given that the Qur'an has Abraham arguing with his father about idolatry and confuting Nimrod, which ultimately go back to the Genesis Rabbah (a Rabbinical expansion/commentary on Genesis). But, once again, the Qur'anic retelling does not preclude that these tales were had only by word of mouth rather than from actual study in a Rabbinical institute in either 'Eretz Yisroel or Mesopotamia. And, given that both those reions of Jewish settlement were close to the Arabian Peninsula, it is likely that Muhammad, the travelling businessman, probably had dealings with Rabbinical Jewish merchants.
Ibn Warraq (and many others) are right to note connections between early Islam and the Abrahamic faiths; but close examination of these connections shows that Muhammad picked up a few scraps and ran with them rather than truly digesting biblical religion.
Hence, I'll always disagree with certain 19th and early 20th century scholars who speak of Islam "rediscovering" Judaism, presumably after a long period of Christian influence in the Middle East. There is much that is derivative of pagan Arab tradition, and perhaps much that is theologically "creative" (in the bad sense of the term) in Islam, too.