WHEREAS IN VERSE 82 we have this passage:

Thou wilt find the most vehement of mankind in hostility to those who believe (to be) the Jews and the idolaters. And thou wilt find the nearest of them in affection to those who believe (to be) those who say: Lo! We are Christians. That is because there are among them priests and monks, and because they are not proud.

If we accept that the phrase and the Christians in verse 51 is an insertion, we see that it was added to make a dividing line with the Christians, while the debate previously was hostile to the Jews alone.

In the end, such adjustments can be caused by all too human weaknesses.

The third case: the later editor does not understand what the earlier editor meant.

And there is still a fourth case. Sometimes, changes have been made in order to accommodate certain requirements. Such can be found in

layers of the ascetic text with others less so. The representation of Paradise also develops. In its later version, we encounter sensual elements that were not there before.

A composite picture of the author of the Qur’ān

Guillaume Dye has attempted to see more clearly the identity and character of the minds that gave the Qur’ān its present form. “We have been treating the text as a collection, but we must deal with each case separately,” he warns, before giving a quick glimpse of the figure to whom he attributes the writing of sūra 19, known as Maryam – Mary, the mother of Christ. It is full of details borrowed from the context of the New Testament. As Guillaume Dye observe:

If I were asked to give a profile of the author of sūra 19, I would conclude that it was a person who was probably a Christian monk from Jerusalem who converted to Islam, or who at any rate put his pen to the service of the new authority.

On the questions of Muḥammad and the early Muslms

But where should we place Muḥammad  in this panorama? And what in the Qur’ān should be attributed to him? Guillaume Day admits that

it remains difficult to say exactly where we should place him in this matter. We still have work to do.

In any case, if academics do not agree on the personality of Muḥammad, there is one thing that is beyond dispute: his knowledge of the Bible. For some, he was influenced by a form of Judaism, for others, he was influenced by one of the many Christian currents existing in the East during the period of late antiquity. Other scholars assume that Muḥammad is an ambassador of Manichaeism, a belief that holds that creation is divided into two principles and that the struggle between good and evil divides the world and humanity.

Mohammad Ali Amir Moezzi points to another path:

I believe that the Prophet belongs to a Biblical tradition, and within this framework, the Judeo-Christian path seems acceptable to me, but I cannot decide.

He outlines the features of this intellectual family that could have provided Muḥammad with the framework for his message:

Christian Jews – that is, Jews who retained their Jewish beliefs and practices but accepted Jesus as the Messiah and Christ; Jews who maintained circumcision, the observance of the Sabbath, and the prohibition on eating pork, and so on.

Claude Gilliot, professor emeritus at the University of Aix-Marseille, at the Institute for Research and Studies on the Arab and Muslim Worlds, has been working for years on the formation of the Qur’ān. He has his own hypothesis about the role of Muḥammad , which he sums up for us like this:

Muḥammad played the role of translator who must be understood in both senses: translator and interpreter.

Against this background, he identifies the first nucleus of the Qur’ān:

Originally, it was a collection of very brief teachings intended to prepare believers for the Last Judgment.[1]

Because, as he says, Muḥammad  and his Companions were obsessed with the question of salvation and the End of Time – the imminent end of time as they believed –

it was a very eschatological community. We could even go further and talk about people who celebrated a kind of mass.

He gives nourishment to his though from the relationship between the Qur’ān and the Bible:

Whole passages of the Qur’ān remind us of the literary genre of the Psalms. Muḥammad was fascinated by the Psalms.

This similarity, in his opinion, is not without its problems for the modern reader. “If we supposed that the Bible was made up just of the Psalms” he says, “many things would remain allusive, and we would not be able to understand them.”

Suggested Reading

Deconstructing the Islamic narrative

Historians and Believers

Incomprehension stands at the heart of the difficulties. The possibility a Qur’ān evolving little by little, in successive phases, within human minds, and long since lapsing into competing versions – the all of them detached from Muḥammad – unclear and uncertain as to their role, these are theses unheard of to many Muslims around the world. The whole exercise can come across as very provocative. So developing this kind of exposition demands some intellectual precautions. Says Anne-Sylvie Boisliveau:

We must always say from which position we are speaking because it can be seen as an aggression. I once said, during a conference in Turkey, that we can extract interesting elements from this type of study and not necessarily elements of deconstruction of belief in God. I noticed that after we started asking questions, things went better.

All our interlocutors are academics and, therefore, are able to see that these tensions also affect the student body:

There can be tensions with the students. But we begin by saying that at the university, by definition, it is a university business. We are not , therefore, trying to impose a belief. And then, if the students are present there, it is because they accept this principle. From the moment we ask the students to play this game, they are prepared to listen without embarrassment or squeamishness.

Students, or believers, or both, must understand how to look at this past without blinking an eyelid, as Mohammad Ali Amir Moezzi puts it:

If I were the one who alone doubted the perfection or uniqueness or singularity of the Qur’ān, that would be a problem. But when the students see that there are a large number of texts hailing from all kinds of religious currents in Islam, and if these students are already confronting the question of the plurality of the Qur’ān, they will be saying to themselves: “It is my own sense of the textual tradition, and I have to assume that that is the case”.

He then concludes:

How then should we understand it, and what conclusions should we draw from it? Well, that is another matter. I myself draw the conclusions of a historian. It is up to the believers to draw the conclusions of believers.

[1] This idea is very close to that presented by the Tunisian researcher Khaled Belkin, the nucleus in his thesis being ‘the northern Qur’ān’.

Read Part One of this analysis here