ALMOST exactly a century ago, Richard Bell, a scholar of Semitic languages and minister in the Church of Scotland, gave the Gunning Lectures at the University of Edinburgh. Published in 1926 as The Origin of Islam in its Christian Environment, they aimed “to present the origin of Islam against a background of surrounding Christianity”. The Christianity of the late-antique Near East, Bell argued, was largely “degenerate”, and Muhammad’s knowledge of it was piecemeal and acquired only gradually. “There is”, he said, “no good evidence of any seats of Christianity in the Hijaz or in the near neighbourhood of Mecca or even of Medina.”
Using Bell as his foil, Gabriel Reynolds, a leading scholar of the Qur’an based at the University of Notre Dame, argues that both the form and content of the Qur’an were profoundly shaped by the Christian culture of its immediate environment. Christians, he proposes, were a major presence in the seventh-century Hijaz, and their Christianity, far from consisting of obscure or “degenerate” heresies, was that of the mainline Churches of the late-antique Near East (that is, the Melkite Church, the Syrian Orthodox Church, and the Church of the East).
These Christians were evangelistic, and made up a large proportion of the Qur’an’s original audience: their presence was greater and more significant than that of the Jews of the Hijaz. The evidence for this Christian presence comes partly from pre-Islamic Arabic inscriptions (currently a thriving field of scholarly research), but, above all, from the Qur’an itself.
The Qur’an’s repeated insistence that it was revealed in Arabic, for instance, implies the existence of scriptures in other languages in its milieu. Its use of biblical turns of phrase (for example, about a camel going through the eye of the needle, or “the circumcision of the heart”) and biblical and post-biblical legends (about the creation of Adam and the fall of Satan, Joseph’s sojourn in Egypt, or the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus) suggests that biblical and post-biblical material was well known to its Arabic-speaking audience. Its instructions to Muhammad on how to speak with the Jews and Christians and its references to what Christians “say” (e.g. Qur’an 5:2 and 9:30) intimate that there were actual Christians who debated with Muhammad and his followers.
Reynolds’s thesis, which builds on important recent research (including his own) into the Qur’an and its biblical subtext, is not that the Qur’an proclaims a distorted form of Christianity. Quite the contrary, he contends that the Qur’an engages with Christianity and the biblical tradition in a fundamentally polemical way, reshaping them to produce a message that is different from — and often opposed to — Christian teaching. Biblical narratives and phrases, accounts of Christ’s miracles taken from the Gospels and apocrypha, and words put into the mouth of Jesus are made to serve the Qur’an’s own theology and vision of salvation history.
According to this vision, the message revealed to the Qur’anic prophet supersedes those given to the Jews and Christians, and it is the coming of Muhammad rather than the Kingdom of heaven which is the “good news” preached by Christ. “The Qur’an”, Reynolds finds, “was not informed by Christianity, but rather was a response to Christianity.”
Though technical in places, this book merits the attention of Church Times readers for its clear and compelling account of that response.
Dr Fitzroy Morrissey is Associate Professor of Islamic Studies and Law at the University of Oxford, and a Fellow of Pembroke College.
Christianity and the Qur’an: The rise of Islam in Christian Arabia
Gabriel Reynolds
Yale £25
(978-0-300-28175-0)
Church Times Bookshop £22.50
