Reading the Qur'an - The Qur'an and the Old Testament

Left: my Study Qur'an, a present from my wife. Right: my Hebrew Bible, a present from my past self.

I spent the last month reading the second surah of the Qur'an, Al-Baqarah, The Cow. It's named after a bit of dialog in verses 66-71 between Moses and the Israelites about sacrificing a special cow. Al-Baqarah is full of incidents like this one, that refer to the books that Christians call the Old Testament (OT), so in reviewing Al-Baqarah this post will focus on the varying ways that the Qur'an quotes, reshapes, references, and reinvents the OT.

Before that, let's back up slightly and talk about Al-Baqarah as a whole. It is the longest surah by far, comprising about one twelfth of the Qur'an, and having 286 verses. It covers a huge range of topics, including theology, law, history, cosmology, and spirituality. It also contains one of the most important verses in the whole Muslim tradition, the Pedestal Verse:

God, there is no god but He, the Living, the Self-Subsisting. Neither slumber overtakes Him nor sleep. Unto Him belongs whatsoever is in the heavens and whatsoever is on the earth. Who is there who may intercede with Him save by His leave? He knows that which is before them and that which is behind them. And they encompass nothing of His Knowledge, save what He wills. His Pedestal embraces the heavens and the earth. Protecting them tires Him not, and He is the Exalted, the Magnificent. (2:255)

The Pedestal Verse is one of the first verses that Muslims memorize, is often recited when setting out on a journey, and can be found on the walls of many mosques and homes. And you can see why--it's a beautiful description of the nature of God, and of God's majesty and power over creation, and his ability to protect it. As a Christian, though, I often find the Qur'an's vision of God to be missing a key element--love.

The Bible frequently treats God as a lover, who is passionate about the covenant people, often to the point of jealousy. So far in my reading of the Qur'an, I haven't encountered this metaphor, or any sense of God's love for humanity--except for God's compassion and mercy, which comes up at the beginning of each surah of the Qur'an, all of which begin: In the name of God, the Compassionate, the Merciful.* Instead of love, the Qur'an seems to emphasize God's justice and power. To my Arminian mind, it reads a little like a parody of Calvinism. (This is all premature of course--I've only read about a sixth of the book so far!)

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The Qur'an draws on the Old Testament regularly and in a variety of ways, but in general it does one of two things with the OT text:

1. In some cases, the Qur'an will paraphrase, repurpose, and/or expand an event from the OT. So far in my readings, the story is never a direct quotation, and is typically used to make some kind of point that would have been outside the scope of the original text. 
2. Often, though, the Qur'an will simply take characters from the OT and make completely original uses of them. The characters' essential traits are often familiar, but the events of the stories are entirely new. Sometimes, the characters are named, without any story to speak of at all--they simply appear as names to make a rhetorical point.

De Geschiedenis van Adam en Eva (detail), Jan Breughel de Jonge, Wikimedia

A good example of #1 is the story of Adam and the naming of the animals. Here's the OT version: 

Then the Lord God said, “It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him a helper as his partner.” So out of the ground the Lord God formed every animal of the field and every bird of the air, and brought them to the man to see what he would call them; and whatever the man called every living creature, that was its name. The man gave names to all cattle, and to the birds of the air, and to every animal of the field; but for the man there was not found a helper as his partner. (Genesis 2:18-20, NRSV)

Here's the Qur'an's version: 

And when thy Lord said to the angels, “I am placing a viceregent upon the earth,” they said, “Wilt Thou place therein one who will work corruption therein, and shed blood, while we hymn Thy praise and call Thee Holy?” He said, “Truly I know what you know not.” And He taught Adam the names, all of them. Then He laid them before the angels and said, “Tell me the names of these, if you are truthful.” They said, “Glory be to Thee! We have no knowledge save what Thou hast taught us. Truly Thou art the Knower, the Wise.” He said, “Adam, tell them their names.” And when he had told them their names He said, “Did I not say to you that I know the unseen of the heavens and the earth, and that I know what you disclose and what you used to conceal?” And when We said to the angels, “Prostrate unto Adam,” they prostrated, save Iblīs. He refused and waxed arrogant, and was among the disbelievers. (2:30-34, "The Cow")

As you can see, there is a shared story element--the first man, Adam, reciting the names of every living creature--but the context, the purpose, and even the event itself, are all quite different. In the OT, Adam names the creatures himself, whereas in the Qur'an, he is merely taught the names. In the OT, the purpose of the story is to introduce Adam's loneliness and lack of a partner, whereas in the Qur'an, the story demonstrates Adam's superiority over the angels. In the OT, the context is a larger narration about the origins of God's creation and the expulsion of the first humans from paradise, whereas in the Qur'an, the context is a demonstration of God's superiority and sovereignty over all.

Adam Honored by Angels, Persian Miniature c. 1560, Wikimedia

There are probably less radically altered stories than this one, but for the most part, the Qur'an seems to delight in taking rather small seeds of plot from the OT and growing wildly different story trees from them. 

Abraham is a key figure in the Qur'an--he will certainly merit his own entry on this blog in the coming months, if I can find the time--and he often appears in way #2, an OT character plucked from the original and given new things to do in a new text. Here's a pair of verses where he appears in in this surah, with no obvious OT parallels: 

Hast thou not considered him who disputed with Abraham about his Lord because God had given him sovereignty? When Abraham said, “My Lord gives life and causes death,” he said, “I give life and cause death.” Abraham said, “Truly God brings the sun from the east. Bring it, then, from the west.” Thus was he who disbelieved confounded. And God guides not wrongdoing people. (2:258, "The Cow") 

And when Abraham said, “My Lord, show me how Thou givest life to the dead,” He said, “Dost thou not believe?” He said, “Yea, indeed, but so that my heart may be at peace.” He said, “Take four birds and make them be drawn to thee. Then place a piece of them on every mountain. Then call them: they will come to thee in haste. And know that God is Mighty, Wise. (2:260, "The Cow)

We see the essential character of Abraham, at once trusting profoundly in God in 2:258 (as he does in the OT when he trusts God's promise of land and descendants), but also challenging God (as he does when he bargains with God in the OT). Yet these specific tales, of Abraham's dispute with a man doubting God's sovereignty, and of God resurrecting some birds as proof of the final resurrection, occur nowhere in the OT, not even in highly altered form.

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What are we to make of this? Islamic tradition, and the Qur'an itself, holds that the Bible as Christians know it today is in part a revelation from God, but that Christians and Jews have corrupted it:

So woe unto those who write the book with their hands, then say, “This is from God,” that they may sell it for a paltry price. So woe unto them for what their hands have written and woe unto them for what they earn. (2:79, "The Cow")

(This verse and others like it--e.g., 7:157, "The Heights"--are often interpreted to refer to intentional alterations to the Bible, made to remove supposed prophecies about the coming of Mohammed, God's final prophet.) So one way to see this relationship is the Qur'an restoring the corrupted message of the older text: the altered stories and the new ones are what ought to have appeared in the old. Another way to understand these two texts is to propose, as many have, that there were alternative, unrecorded traditions about OT figures circulating by word of mouth throughout the near east in antiquity, and the Qur'an simply references and makes use of these existing stories.

In his 2010 book, The Qur'an and Its Biblical Subtext, Gabriel Said Reynolds argues that the Bible is key to interpreting the Qur'an. He even goes so far as to say that the Bible is a better guide to Qur'ranic interpretation than the life of Mohammad, which is both the traditional and secular academic norm for interpreting the book: "[T]he Qur’an ... should not be read in conversation with what came after it (tafsir [traditional early interpretations including accounts of the life of Mohammad]) but with what came before it (Biblical literature)" (pg. 13).

In Reynolds' somewhat radical view, the tafsir, the early interpreters of the Qur'an, appear to be inventing episodes in the life of Mohammad in order to explain the text. These interpreters claim an unbroken chain of memory from the time of the prophet centuries earlier, but appear to have forgotten a number of highly salient details, such as the purpose of the mysterious unconnected letters at the beginning of a number of surahs (pg. 19), or who the Sabians, a group who are named alongside Muslims, Christians, ad Jews, actually were (pg. 20). Reynolds casts doubt on the tafsir as reliable sources, and points us to the material that we know pre-exists the Qur'an as a means of divining its meanings: the Bible.

At all events, it is clear that the OT is a valuable resource for understanding and engaging with the Qur'an. If nothing else, it provides a place to compare and contrast story elements and recurring characters, which makes for a fine way of investigating the author's purposes and meanings. If a story has been altered, we can ask: what has been changed, and to what end? If OT characters appear in the Qur'an, are they recognizable or not? What rhetorical, theological, or historical purposes do they serve? Regardless of whether Reynolds is right about the reliability of the early interpreters of the Qur'an, the OT has proved a great place to go for thinking in depth about Islam's scripture.

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*This formulation is called the Basmala, and it's actually missing from the ninth surah, which has led some to speculate that it may have originally been the second half of surah eight. Psalms 9 and 10 in the Old Testament are like this--together, they appear to form an acrostic poem, in which every other line begins with successive letters of the alphabet.

Bibliography:

Nasr, Seyyed Hossein, Caner K. Dagli, Maria Massi Dakake, Joseph E. B. Lumbard, and Mohammed Rustom. The Study Quran: A New Translation and Commentary. New York: HarperCollins, 2015.

Reynolds, Gabriel Said. The Qur'an and Its Biblical Subtext. London: Routledge, 2010.