Jews, Christians, and the Abode of Islam: Modern Scholarship, Medieval Realities

PART ONE

ENCOUNTERING THE OTHER

Western Scholarship and the Foundations of Islamic Civilization

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Orientalists

The Modern Quest for Muhammad and the Origins of Islamic Civilization

By all accounts, the origins of Islam can be traced to the seventh century CE when Muhammad ibn ‘Abdallah (d. 632), an Arab of Meccan origins, declared himself to be the messenger of God. To be more precise, the Qurayshite tribesman, from the Hijaz region of West Arabia, claimed he was the last of a long chain of monotheist prophets, most of them figures well known from biblical tradition. As Muslim scripture puts it, he was the Seal of the Prophets (khatam al-nabiyin). Later Muslim commentary expanded that descriptive label to include sayyid al-anbiya’ the Lord [that is most noble] of the Prophets. In such fashion, Muslims claimed for Muhammad a status that transcended that of Moses as well as Jesus. Despite his dramatic claim to religious preeminence, Muhammad was initially rejected, along with his message, by the overwhelming majority of his idol-worshipping kinsmen. In order to pursue his calling, the self-declared prophet was compelled to abandon his native Mecca for a more compatible environment, ultimately relocating with a group of followers at a nearby oasis called Yathrib, but more commonly known to all as Medina, the administrative center [of the Prophet]. There, together with a group of diverse adherents, he overcame opposition among the local converts to Islam; exiled the resident Jewish tribes who refused to accept his religious calling and who took up arms against him; exterminated those Jews who allegedly colluded with his foes; and established the foundations of a religious/ political community broadly linked by belief, practice, and shared history to Judaism and Christianity.

In theory, this community, known in Arabic as the ummah, made no distinctions as to tribal, ethnic, or linguistic affiliation. By the simple act of embracing the one and only God of Heaven and testifying to the legitimacy of Muhammad’s status as Messenger of that God, any individual or societal group was given equal standing within the community of the faithful. Religion had, in effect, replaced ties of tribal kinship as the cement that would bind the nascent and all-inclusive Islamic polity. This view of the ummah may have been more idealized than real, but it was—and continues to be until this very day—a powerful, if not indeed the most powerful, unifying force among diverse groups of Muslims, especially in relation to the non-Muslim world.

The community founded by Muhammad eventually spread its political influence well beyond the Hijaz as the Prophet established relations with tribal leaders in various regions of the peninsula. By the year of his death, he was able to defeat the last of his Jewish adversaries; arrange a triumphant return to Mecca; and undertake diplomatic initiatives in all of Arabia. After the Prophet’s death, his successor Abu Bakr dispatched armies throughout the so-called Island of the Arabs, forcing its varied inhabitants to recognize the hegemony of the Muslim authorities situated in Medina. Soon after most Arabia was united in faith, large numbers of Muslim Arab tribesmen crossed the frontiers separating Arabia from the adjoining lands, initiating thereby the conquest that would eventually make Islam the dominant religion of a vast territorial expanse in the Near East and beyond. By the first quarter of the eighth century, Muslim dynasts ruled territories ranging from eastern Iran to the Iberian Peninsula. By the end of the century, Muslim influence extended beyond the Oxus River into Central Asia. The geographical terrain of Islamic rule and the political influence of those who governed on behalf of the new faith had come to rival that of the earlier Roman Empire, and, like the rise of imperial Rome, the expansion and growth of Islam was a dramatic achievement that changed the course of history.

Vast areas of the Christian world along the southern rim of the Mediterranean and in the Fertile Crescent, that arc of territory from the borders of Egypt to the lands of ancient Mesopotamia, succumbed first to the initial Muslim invasion. Then in the 670s a Muslim fleet sailed to the juncture of Europe and Asia Minor to attack Constantinople, the capital of the Eastern Roman Empire. Although unsuccessful, this naval assault on the center of Byzantine rule was a remarkable feat. At the outset of the Muslim conquest four decades earlier, the Muslim fighting forces consisted entirely of mounted desert warriors, their tactics best suited for small units of light cavalry fighting in open terrain. The creation of a naval capability, which allowed Muslims to launch a fully coordinated offensive against the largest and best fortified city in all of Eastern Christianity, was a harbinger of future developments. Less than a half century later, a Muslim army, which had been ferried across the Straits of Gibraltar, began subduing the Iberian Peninsula, threatening thereby the eventual expansion of Muslim rule into what is today southern France. Christians managed to retain control of the Gallic lands beyond Iberia as well as most of the Byzantine heartland in Asia Minor, but the Islamic threat to Christianity was far from over. In the Latin West, Iberia was contested until the fall of Granada, the last Muslim stronghold, in 1492. In the East, the Arab expansion, which initiated an intense rivalry between Muslims and Eastern Christians, waxed and waned over decades and then centuries until the Ottoman Turks destroyed the last formal vestiges of Byzantine rule in 1453. The victorious Turks then began their assault on Christian Europe, marching westward through Greece and the Balkans until reaching the gates of Vienna not once but twice. Their advance was finally halted in the seventeenth century, and Europeans began the incipient rollback of Ottoman rule, a process that took two hundred years and more to complete.

A BRIEF SKETCH OF CHRISTIAN EUROPE’S INITIAL ENGAGEMENT WITH THE WORLD OF ISLAM

It seems odd that the rapid Arab conquests of the Near East and North Africa, and especially the imposition of Muslim rule in the Iberian Peninsula, events of the seventh and eight centuries, did not stimulate greater intellectual curiosity about Islamic culture in the Latin West. It was not until the Crusades brought Latin Christianity to the Muslim heartland at the end of the eleventh century, and a resurgence of Christian power in Spain challenged Islam’s toehold on the continent of Europe, that Europeans felt a compelling need to better acquaint themselves with the civilization of their powerful Muslim rivals. Be that as it may, interest in Islam was not sudden, or as the Arabs say like the crack of dawn. Largely fanciful stories of the Muslims told by pilgrims returning from the Holy Land had long circulated in the Latin West, along with various materials obtained by way of Christians from the Byzantine Empire. Among the latter were popular apocalyptic accounts, Latin versions of polemical, or more correctly apologetic texts, originally written in Greek. Moreover, there was a serious engagement with various branches of Islamic scholarship even before the Crusaders firmly planted themselves in the heartland of Islam. The translation of Arabic philosophical and scientific works was already well developed in the multi-cultural environment of Islamic Spain, where local Christians had long been in contact with learned Muslims and Jews, as well as with their coreligionists to the north.

The impetus to produce translations from Arabic beyond Spain received formal support from Peter the Venerable, the twelfth-century Abbot of Cluny, one of the foremost churchmen on the European continent. However, for Peter and others sharing his views, the point of these translations was not to make the legacy of the ancient Hellenistic world, the so-called Greek or foreign sciences as the Arabs called them, accessible to Christian scholars of the Latin West. Peter’s interest was not in the Islamic world’s discovery and preservation of Greek philosophy, medicine, astronomy, and the like, subjects that whetted the intellectual appetites of Jews, Christians, and Muslims in Spain, as it had earlier the learned scholars of all three faiths in the Islamic lands to the east, particularly Syria and Iraq. The great European churchman was driven not by intellectual curiosity but rather a more practical concern—that of combating the powerful religion that had become ascendant in former lands of the Christian world. At Peter’s request, the Qur’an was first rendered into Latin in 1143 by Robert of Ketton. Other texts were soon to follow. Peter himself wrote a refutation of Islam, which he described as an abominable heresy. Not surprisingly, he supported the conquest of Spain and beyond that the effort of the Crusaders to establish Christian rule in the Holy Land. In similar fashion, the anti-Muslim tracts of Eastern Christians, written originally in Arabic or Syriac, the scholarly language of many Eastern communities, were translated for defenders of the faith in the West. Over time, Muhammad was portrayed as a charlatan, a magician who beguiled the gullible and ignorant Arabs, and, ironically enough, as an idolater and a source of veneration by idolaters—all of which was intended to denigrate Islam and fortify Christian resolve.

Nevertheless, not every churchman was convinced Christians should preoccupy themselves with Muslim writings and beliefs, even for the sake of refuting the unbelievers. Bernard of Clairvaux, a contemporary of Peter and a cleric of wide prominence, warned that those who studied and translated Muslim tomes ran the risk of having their faith undermined. Despite Peter’s narrow agenda, which linked translation to anti-Muslim polemics, and Bernard’s broad warning against any translations whatsoever, the effort to acquire the knowledge of the Muslims and the ancient heritage they preserved continued unabated over centuries, spreading beyond the Iberian Peninsula well into the Latin Christian heartland, a process that will be described more fully below (in part 2, chapter 11, on Islamic philosophy and science).

Throughout the Middle Ages, the interest in Islamic texts was confined to residual traces of much-valued Greek scholarship; Arabic advances in philosophy, mathematics, and astronomy; Muslim scripture; traditions about Muhammad; and polemical and apologetic tracts of Christians writing in the Islamic world. For hundreds of years, there was no particular interest in the vast Arabic literature devoted to the core of what Muslims called the Islamic sciences: Qur’an commentary (tafsir); the complex hermeneutics linked to the traditions of the Prophet (hadith): Islamic substantive law (shari‘ah) and jurisprudence (fiqh); and speculative theology (kalam). With very few exceptions, the Christians accompanying the Crusader warriors made little if any effort to understand the religious moorings of their Muslim adversaries, even as they sought to rule their domains and convert them to the true faith. Among Christians in Western Europe, only Ramon Lull (d. 1315 or 1316) took the effort to interrogate Islamic texts, having studied Arabic for many years with a Muslim slave in Majorca, the Spanish island that served as a cultural crossroads as did much of Christian Spain.

Not that Lull, a free-spirited character turned pious Christian, was ever sympathetic to Islam. When the Christian Kingdom of Jerusalem was destroyed by a Muslim army in 1291, he urged the use of force to recapture the initiative. In Lull’s judgment, such a military campaign would require the Christians to learn the language of their adversaries; this eminently sensible suggestion went unheeded by and large. He was also a strong advocate of converting the infidels by using their own tradition to dispute their claims. Although actively seeking to convert Muslims was declared by the latter an offense punishable by death, Lull was not dissuaded and journeyed into the Abode of Islam to spread the true faith. He was reportedly stoned by a Muslim mob in North Africa, the last of several quixotic forays of his into the lands of the infidels.

Learned churchmen were not the only consumers of Islamic cultural artifacts. The portrayal of Muslims in the popular European literature of the Middle Ages contains occasional echoes of entertaining Arabic tales that found their way into the Latin West, but, broadly speaking, these portraits bear little if any resemblance to the contemporaneous Muslim world, a place of material splendor and great intellectual sophistication. Rather, the Islamic lands were often presented in Western literature as places of fantastical objects and beings, all of which excited the imagination of Europeans, the overwhelming majority of whom did not venture far beyond their domains. Islam and the Muslims would also serve as a literary trope for declaring the newest of monotheist religions a dangerous Christian heresy. With that opinion of Islam, Christians denied altogether that Muhammad considered himself to be divinely inspired; rather, he inspired a conscious deviation from the true faith, namely Christianity. Were that not sufficient to malign Muhammad and the Muslims, the worst features of their false religion were then said to have been imitated by insincere Christians misusing power in their own world. Such sentiments, born of a malice that had become endemic to Christian Europe following the Reformation, did not require a detailed knowledge of Islam and the Muslims. The mere claim of links to the infidels and their beliefs was sufficient to discredit the enemies of pure Christian faith.

On the other hand, in the sixteenth century and especially in the seventeenth, European scholars who would later be known as orientalists began to study Arabic in earnest and with objectives that extended beyond polemics and the acquisition of ancient scientific knowledge. When the Ottoman Turks captured the Byzantine capital, terminating eleven hundred years of Christian imperial rule, and then overran the Balkans, penetrated central Europe, and laid siege to Vienna, there was a perceived need for individuals learned in the ways of the Muslims and skilled in Islamic languages. How else could Europeans transact the business of war, diplomacy, and commerce? The result was an expanded interest in all aspects of Islamic civilization. Ramon Lull may have been an adventurer guided by Christian zeal, but he certainly foresaw Europe’s need to engage Islam and the Muslims through knowledge of their language and, by implication, their rich and complex culture.

There was yet another reason to occasion interest in Near Eastern languages. Protestant reformers, seeking to clarify the meaning of the Old Testament, strongly emphasized the original Hebrew text over the Latin Vulgate, which had been for countless generations the standard translation serving Christians in the West. Understanding the literal meaning of the Old Testament allowed for more accurate translations into the vernacular languages of an expanded readership, especially after the introduction of printing and the widespread distribution of books. Bible scholars well trained in Greek and Latin thus turned their attention to Hebrew and sought to learn languages related to it, such as Aramaic, Syriac, and Arabic. Some scholars also mastered Ethiopic, as well as Turkish and Persian. The primary purpose of learning Arabic, along with several other languages, was not to defame Islam but to clarify the meaning of the biblical text as a guide to true Christian belief and behavior. Because of its similarity to Hebrew, it was believed Arabic could unlock many passages of the Old Testament that were obscure or had given rise to interpretive flights of fancy by overly imaginative and/or doctrinaire Latin scholars and commentators. The learned Europeans sought what Jewish scholars described as the p’shat or literal meaning of the text as opposed to its d’rash or exegetical accretions.

The Protestants were not alone in taking up Arabic; Catholics were also intent on learning Hebrew and the cognate languages that ordinarily accompanied the study of Hebrew. The Catholic effort at learning cognate languages was assisted by learned Maronites, Lebanese Christian Arabs linked to Rome who had the advantage of being well versed in both Arabic and Syriac. The Maronites who visited Rome were given the task of missionary activity in the Near East—but not among the Muslims, a risky venture to say the least. Rather, the Maronites were given a mandate to convert the Eastern Christians to the mother Church. In any case, all this activity, be it Protestant or Catholic, gave rise to a heightened interest in teaching Arabic in a rigorous fashion. Arabic grammars were written in Latin and an Arabic-Latin dictionary also made its appearance. Above all, professorships in Arabic were endowed at leading European universities in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, giving the subject hitherto unknown scholarly cachet in places like Oxford and Cambridge, in addition to providing scholars with adequate financial resources to carry on their work without risking penury.

Given full academic stature, the study of Arabic, Hebrew, and an expanding number of other related languages gave birth to the beginning of comparative religious studies, as Christians increasingly looked beyond their own world. Establishing Arabic as part of the formal curriculum, however, did not imply European savants embraced a more sympathetic attitude toward Muhammad and the Muslims. The endowed professors who took to collecting a wider range of Arabic (and also some important Syriac) texts on Islam were not entirely free of the usual Christian prejudices toward Muhammad and the early Muslim community. The publication of material on Islam and the Muslims was accompanied by the requisite anti-Islamic polemics, often juxtaposed with anti-Jewish sentiments, a carryover from earlier times. Only well into the eighteenth century and more particularly the nineteenth did the study of Arabic and Islam branch out on its own and shed some but not all of its polemical baggage. For the first time, materials were assembled that could lead to a broader understanding of early and later Islamic history. There was also a heightened interest in Arabic literary texts, for example the Thousand and One Nights, a collection of entertaining tales that presented European readers with a lighter, more picaresque picture of Islamic civilization. Elements of the work were known to Europeans in the Middle Ages, but the first, full-length translation, that into French by Antoine Galland (d. 1715), only began appearing in the early eighteenth century, with the last volume published posthumously in 1717.

THE BEGINNINGS OF MODERN SCHOLARSHIP ON ISLAM

The enlightened mood of late eighteenth century Europe brought great advances in the professional study of Islam. The slow decline of Ottoman power and the opening of the Orient and the southern Mediterranean to extensive European travel and commerce, together with increased curiosity of things exotic and far removed from European eyes, stimulated further interest in the Islamic world. Continuing a trend that had begun in the previous century, a spate of serious books appeared in the languages of different countries, including broad-ranging histories and translations of Muslim scripture with explanatory notes. The widespread distribution of printed books made possible the circulation of large numbers of tomes to general readers. By the first quarter of the eighteenth century, curious individuals literate in their native tongue could join the fraternity of scholars learned in Latin and Oriental languages in looking at the world of the Muslims.

A major turning point in the study of Islam, and particularly of Islamic origins, was the founding in Paris (1795) of the École spéciale des langues orientales vivantes, a school devoted exclusively to the study of Oriental languages. Its second director, Antoine-Isaac Silvestre de Sacy (1758–1838), might rightfully be considered the father of modern Islamic studies. Under his leadership, the school established the first systematic curriculum for the teaching of Islamic languages and civilization. Silvestre de Sacy, a learned Frenchman who was largely self-taught, understood the need for proper educational aids. The earlier Arabic grammars, written in Latin and based on Latin grammar, were replaced by his Grammaire Arabe, a highly original work organized according to logical principles that were said to apply to all languages and by models specifically used by Arab grammarians of the Middle Ages. To acquaint students with a wide variety of different genres of Arabic writing, he composed a chrestomathy or reader that served as an introduction to texts in the original language. His own scholarship was meticulous and grounded in a profound knowledge of classical Arabic. His students, who came from various parts of Europe and then accepted teaching assignments in their native countries, took those methods with them, thereby duplicating Islamic studies as it had been reconceived by the master.

Silvestre de Sacy’s love of Arabic—he also knew all the other then-known Semitic languages as well as Persian and Turkish—did not at all imply a favorable view of Islam or its founder, nor a particularly nuanced view of Islamic history. On the whole, his condemnation of what he did not favor seems in retrospect rather excessive; quite the opposite of his cautious approach to the Arabic language and his precise reading of individual Arabic texts. When a scholarly work was published giving Muhammad high marks for religious sincerity, Silvestre de Sacy wrote, in what was an otherwise favorable review, that the author failed to say that Islam’s founder was a skilled and morally compromised imposter. Silvestre de Sacy did not wish to imply by this comment that the prophet of the Arabs was in fact a Christian heretic—the accepted view of an earlier age. He merely wished to emphasize that Muhammad consciously played dirty pool in the complex political games of his Arabian milieu. And yet, it was Silvestre de Sacy himself who set into motion a new and somewhat more tolerant way of looking at Muhammad and his career, a view that was to take root in the Western academy.

Silvestre de Sacy suggested to his former pupil Georg Freytag, who was then teaching at the University of Bonn, that he establish a prize competition for a study dealing with the influence of Judaism on the origins of Islam and its Prophet through an examination of Muslim scripture (Inquirator in fontes Alcorani seu legis Mohammedicae eas qui ex Judaismo derivandi sunt). The prize, won by a young Jewish scholar named Abraham Geiger, whose 1833 essay, published in German as Was hat Mohammed aus den Judenthume aufgenommen? (What Did Muhammad Borrow from Judaism?), elevated European study of Muhammad beyond crude polemics and transformed all subsequent studies on the man and his faith. To be sure, some Europeans who were affected by the Enlightenment and/or had contributed to it had previously found reason to give the Muslim Prophet high marks for his leadership; some, as did Geiger, considered the Muslim a man of genuine if ill-formed religious beliefs. Their arguments were, however, of a broad philosophical nature as befitted their interests; their more favorable assessment of Muhammad was not rooted in a careful analysis of the relevant Arabic texts. In that respect, Geiger’s work marked a turning point in European scholarship toward Muslims and the origins of Islam. It also marked a break with how Jews were prepared to discuss the life and times of Muhammad, the subsequent history of Islam, and the formation and shaping of Islamic civilization.

ABRAHAM GEIGER AND THE BEGINNINGS OF MODERN JEWISH SCHOLARSHIP ON ISLAM

Although medieval Jewish thinkers in the lands of Islam were often deeply steeped in the intellectual climate of the larger world in which they lived, which included of necessity a vibrant Islamic culture, they were most reluctant to openly discuss the history of Jewish-Muslim relations. Muhammad’s acrimonious dealings with the Jews of his time and the subsequent history of Islam and Jewish-Muslim relations of later times receive scant if any mention from the oldest monotheists. Jews of towering intellect and great learning could easily have turned their attention to writing history as they did in engaging Muslim philosophy, science, grammatical theory, and a host of other subjects of broad interest. But, as we shall see in our later discussion of Jewish life in the medieval Islamic world, Jews, as a rule, preferred not to create any literature that might enflame Muslim passions or stimulate Jewish messianic yearnings that might endanger the present or future well-being of their communities. For a thousand years and more, Jewish writers in the Islamic world tended to be circumspect in mentioning Muhammad and the rise of Islam even when writing in Hebrew, a language Muslims very rarely if ever acquired. It was only after Islamic studies emerged as a scientific discipline in modern Europe that Jewish scholars trained in Western universities devoted their full attention to events that had taken place a millennium and more earlier, a path of enquiry ably paved by young Geiger.

A child prodigy who was already well versed in classical Jewish sources at the age of five, Geiger was home-educated in Jewish texts by his father and then stepbrother. Being orthodox rabbis of the old school, they denied him the formal education that would have allowed him entry into the world of the German university. But as they did not deny him self-study of profane subjects, Geiger acquired in a desultory fashion the requisite knowledge of Greek and Latin to enroll at the University of Heidelberg; he later transferred to Bonn. Like Geiger, many Jewish students of the time were well versed in Hebrew and Aramaic from youth, and therefore opted to concentrate on Oriental languages. Geiger defined his university interests more broadly. In addition to Arabic, he focused on speculative theology, general philosophy, cultural history, and the usual curriculum in Classics. All that served as background to his ultimate interest in reforming Judaism by embracing Wissenschaft des Judenthums, a movement spawned by the Jewish Enlightenment that portrayed Judaism as a constantly evolving religion; that is, a religion shaped and reshaped by historic events that could be tracked to particular times and places. With such information, a modern Judaism could adjust to contemporary contingencies without losing sight of its historic roots. It would appear that this historically oriented approach to studying change in the development of Judaism and acting on the lessons obtained thereof also informed Geiger’s truly path-breaking essay on the origins of Islam.

No less than Silvestre de Sacy himself wrote that Geiger’s work rendered almost superfluous all previous discussion of the subject, discussion that the founder of modern Islamic studies regarded as superficial, by which he no doubt meant without methodological rigor and ungrounded in compelling textual evidence. What indeed did Geiger do to merit such acclaim, and from the doyen of Islamic studies no less? Looking back at this scholarly project undertaken some 175 years ago, one is astounded at how Geiger’s method for tracing cultural influence and exploring the origins of Islam via a study of the Qur’an was so brilliantly conceived. Although, as we shall see, some of his assumptions are naïve by current standards, and some of his conclusions force the evidence he cites to reveal more than it possibly can, his dissertation remains until this very day an interesting if not indeed valuable contribution to Jewish-Muslim studies.

The author begins with an observation that scholars often grasp intuitively what they later discover to be true. However, it was one thing to intuit that Muhammad borrowed from Judaism in his Qur’anic pronouncements. No doubt, many suspected that was the case—why else hold a prize competition to demonstrate the extent of cultural borrowing? It was another matter to prove what and how the Muslim Prophet borrowed from the older monotheist faith. And so, Geiger turns to the Qur’anic text in order to establish probable cause for Muhammad’s borrowing from Judaism and the means by which that borrowing could be accomplished. Seeking a convenient point of entry by which to build a credible argument for Jewish influence, he turns to the life and times of Muhammad. The implicit assumption is that one cannot truly understand a text without proper access to the circumstances in which it was created. This was, of course, the same conceptual framework by which Geiger and other participants in Wissenschaft des Judenthums attempted to recover Jewish states of the past, and which general historians would use to discover the histories of different peoples and cultures in Europe. In that sense at least, Geiger walked the same wide path as his younger and more traditional contemporary Heinrich Graetz, the Jewish historian who spent some twenty years publishing his monumental Geschichte der Juden von den ältesten Zeiten bis auf die Gegenwart. In that multivolume history of the Jews, Graetz explored every possible setting in which Jews lived from the biblical age to modern times. Geiger, barely into his twenties, also anticipated the views of Leopold von Ranke, the great nineteenth-century historian of Europe, who believed that by accumulating all the historical data from a given time and place one could rediscover the past as it actually was, thus promoting a modern historiography that was deeply rooted in archival research.

Unfortunately, no such archives had been discovered for the life and times of the Muslim Prophet. Moreover, we must take into consideration the limited number of Arabic texts that were available to Geiger, especially in reliable editions. Retracing Jewish influence on the origins of Islam was, therefore, no simple task. Ever cautious, Geiger sought ways to narrow the odds of erring in search of that influence. Wary of teleological explanations and historical back projections, he inveighed against using Jewish sources later than the Qur’an at the start of his study. His initial search for Jewish influence was therefore confined to material from the Hebrew Bible and Talmud, sources widely distributed and read by Jews well before Muhammad’s mission and the rise of Islam. Geiger also included legendary Jewish texts not found in the Talmud, but only those accounts he thought predated Muslim scripture. He was similarly disinclined to use later Islamic materials that were then available—at least he did not look to them at the outset of his project. Only when he had finished his initial investigation did he allow himself to peruse the original passages of the Qur’an through the eyes of later Muslim authorities. Just as many reform-minded Jews sought to privilege Hebrew scripture over what they considered the fanciful and restrictive accretions of later rabbinic works, Geiger privileged the most sacred of all Muslim writing. However, when the later Muslim sources confirmed his original insights about specific passages, he gave credence to them. There is little question that Geiger was confident of his ability to intuit the truth; one could perhaps argue, too confident. Nevertheless, given the paucity and nature of the sources available to him, what Geiger ultimately accomplished is impressive.

Most impressive is the design of his research. The might-have-been orthodox rabbi of the old school begins his substantive analysis of Jewish influence on Muhammad and the origins of Islam with a series of interrelated queries, broad questions that still vex thoughtful scholars today: Assuming that Muhammad saw some clear advantage in borrowing from Judaism, did he have the actual means to borrow from Jewish tradition, oral, written, or practiced? Assuming that Muhammad had some access to information about Jews and Judaism, was he limited in his ability to interrogate Jewish sources? These are highly pertinent questions because, as Geiger notes, a comparison of materials from Muslim scripture with similar subject matter from the Hebrew Bible and later Jewish tradition reveals considerable variation between the verses of the Qur’an and the historical narratives and laws of the Jews. How, he asks, are we to explain these disparities? Are they caused by the Muslim Prophet’s total ignorance of specific Jewish texts and/or practices, or a lack of knowledge occasioned by a mere smattering of learning he may have obtained from personal observations and/or from contemporaneous Jewish informants? Continuing this line of enquiry, Geiger asks whether the Qur’anic materials that distort the Jewish past and Jewish practices may represent a deliberate attempt to break with genuine Jewish narratives and traditions with which Muhammad could have been familiar. In other words, if Muhammad had the means and broad incentive to borrow from Judaism, did certain historic circumstances compel him to break with well-known Jewish tradition? More specifically, did Muhammad feel a need to Islamize Jewish tradition in order to validate his own credentials vis-à-vis the Jews who denied his prophetic calling?

Unlike many scholars of the time and several generations thereafter, Geiger was aware that the existence of parallel themes and even practices in the Qur’an and Jewish sources was no proof of cultural borrowing—certainly not of direct borrowing. Rather, he recognized that many religious ideas of a general nature found common expression in the environment that gave rise to Islam; the ideas were in the air, so to speak. What titillates Geiger, however, is not any broad monotheist sentiment that captured the imagination of Muhammad’s contemporaries in west Arabia and beyond, but the possible transfer of specific material from identifiable sources of Jewish provenance, or from oral traditions presumably originating from Jewish texts, rather than Christian or local Arabian traditions. In Geiger’s eyes, Judaism was the more sublime and mature monotheist tradition and therefore a more likely source than Christianity for formulating complex Muslim doctrines and legal rules. He cites many parallels between Muslim and Jewish practices, some with telling effect. His suggestion that Muhammad adapted certain rituals—for example, that various dietary laws and the orientation of prayer to Jerusalem were directly influenced by a desire to convert the Jews—remains conventional wisdom among Western scholars. Some of his suggestions of Jewish influence on Muslim practice, however, seem forced, to say the least.

Despite his broad concern with the development of religious ideas and practices, Geiger, like his orientalist colleagues, never strayed far from philology. Geiger thus extended his hunt for Jewish influence to tracking the vocabulary of Muslim scripture. He reads the Qur’an with an eye to isolating words freighted with religious significance, words that are not Arabic in origin but derived from Hebrew and Jewish Aramaic, thus revealing an obvious Jewish influence, or so Geiger thought. This method of determining direct cultural borrowing and the specific evidence cited did not overly impress Silvestre de Sacy or a number of scholars to follow. Others, usually Christians, would stress that the Qur’an contains a considerable vocabulary derived from Syriac (a version of Aramaic used by the Eastern Christians). Given the attention Muslim scripture devotes to Christians and Christianity, they argued for emphasizing the Christian influence on the Prophet as being at least of equal if not greater importance to the formation of his world view. Geiger certainly did not deny Christian influence; indeed he recognized that Muslim scripture is rich in references to Christians and Christianity, but it was not his task to investigate what Muhammad borrowed from the latter. In any case, Geiger is convinced the Muslim Prophet borrowed more from a profound monotheism unburdened by the concept of the Trinity, a concept rejected as false in the Qur’an. According to Geiger, Muhammad’s familiarity with Judaism was obtained from Jewish informants familiar with some form of an obscure local Jewish tradition that could be linked to what has come to be described as normative Judaism. The suggestion is certainly plausible, indeed even probable; but in stating these views, Geiger no doubt underestimated what may have been the eclectic nature of Jewish beliefs and practices in contemporaneous west Arabia, the birthplace of Islam. In later writings, he admitted how little we know of ancient Arabian Jewry, whose faith and observance were likely mediated through local customs, also little known. Sadly, the same may still be said of our knowledge today.

Not surprisingly, Geiger, with his reverence for the Hebrew Bible, overestimated the value of Muslim scripture as a source for discovering the life and times of the Muslim Prophet and, with that, the setting in which Muhammad could have borrowed from Judaism. As I have noted in other publications, the Qur’an offers no extensive historical framework, nor does it contain material that can be traced directly to conventional forms of historical writing, as do, for example, various books of the Bible. Muslim and Jewish scriptures share a common concern; both emphasize a moral vision of the world, one that is rooted in strict monotheist belief. But on reading the Qur’an, one gets little if any sense of the tight narrative structures that are part and parcel of biblical historiography. The Qur’an reminds us less of the storied books of Samuel, Kings, and Chronicles, or, for that matter, the Gospels portraying the life of Jesus, than of Hebrew prophetic literature, with its explosive linguistic cadences and ambiguous historical and literary referents. After all, the Qur’an represents the public utterances of a prophet; from the perspective of Muslims, the quintessential Prophet of God. That is not to say Muslim scripture is completely devoid of historical content, but whatever references to events and contemporary persons there are do not allow us the liberty to describe the broad history of the times, let alone the fuller meaning of all sorts of difficult passages. No doubt, Muhammad’s audience and perhaps the next generation of his followers could piece together a coherent story of sorts from scattered fragments of narratives, but in the end much was left to the creative imagination of later Muslim commentary.

Muhammad’s public utterances are not history, if by history we mean tales that explain human experience as related to events progressing in time—a story told in an orderly fashion and then informed by an overarching perspective that gives it literary/ intellectual as well as moral coherence. Such as it is, history, or, if you prefer, echoes of historical events, are often spliced together in the Qur’an with references to legislation or moral pleadings and admonitions, usually without a defined or definable historical context. When examined individually and as a whole, the discrete divisions and verses of Muslim scripture often appear disjointed, with little if any evidence of sustained and unified composition, let alone a larger picture of Muhammad and his times. Of the 114 surahs or segments of the Qur’an, only the twelfth, which tells the story of the biblical Joseph, represents a consistent narrative. That is to say, it has a beginning, a middle, and end, all framed within a single tale. But this tale, retold from a more ancient past that reflected an earlier monotheist tradition, does little if anything to inform us of the circumstances facing Muhammad or, for that matter, the precise manner in which he may have acquired knowledge of some form of the biblical Joseph story.

In the end, we are always faced with a classic conundrum: scholars interested in the life of the Muslim Prophet and the means by which he may have become acquainted with Jewish (and also Christian) traditions require a broad historical context with which to elaborate on Muslim scripture. But no body of contemporaneous literature with which to establish that context exists, only a highly tendentious Muslim tradition of later times. Simply put, without a reliable historical text or series of texts, there is no sure historical context to inform our reading of the Qur’an let alone allow us to use the scripture as a comfortable point of entry for examining the life of Muhammad and the origins of Islam. Contra Geiger, the Qur’an alone cannot serve as the scaffolding required for building a detailed, let alone comprehensive, analysis of Jewish influence on Muhammad and, more generally, on Islamic origins. Indeed, were it not for the biographical/ historical materials of later Muslim writers and the vast commentary to which the very ambiguities of the Qur’anic text gave rise (mostly works unknown to scholars of Geiger’s time), we would be hard pressed to hazard even a guess as to what broadly transpired at the birth hour of Islam over 1,300 years ago, let alone speak in detail about Muhammad’s life or what he may have borrowed from Judaism.

There are, however, two areas where there is enough evidence from the Qur’an to actually speak of Jewish influence, be it direct or indirect: one is Qur’anic legislation that bears some relation to Jewish law. Here, Geiger, who was thoroughly at home in classical Jewish legal sources, had much of interest to say. But sometimes vast knowledge can force one to see through walls that do not exist, a syndrome not unknown to rabbinic discourse throughout the ages. Most authorities believe he seemed to stretch his case when it came to crossing the t’s and dotting the i’s of certain conclusions. The second area, where one has a safer point of entry into discussing Jewish influence on Islam, is the various narratives linked to the Israelites mentioned in the Hebrew Bible and post-biblical tradition. Here our author is on firmer ground. His great contribution was to track down Jewish parallels to the biblical, or as some prefer, biblicist, tales of the Qur’an, not merely the stories of the Hebrew Bible/ Old Testament—that would have been apparent to many readers given the Bible’s wide readership at the time among Christians and Jews. Rather, Geiger brought to bear his vast knowledge of post-biblical Jewish texts, that is, the rabbinic permutations of biblical narratives that made their way into Muslim scripture. It is a pity he had no access to the vast array of rabbinic literature that was to be uncovered in the years following his work. Perhaps he would have continued to mine the Qur’an for echoes of Jewish influence. As it is, his work and its conceptual framework remained important for generations to follow. It can still be read with profit. Perhaps the greater pity is that young Geiger never returned to Islamic studies but instead devoted his career to writing brilliantly on Jewish matters and in establishing an honored place for