To the contrary, they are given an ostensibly historical context though the prefix of an “ isnad” (“chain of transmission”), indicating they intend to project an aura of historicity, of being-in-the-world.īut what world are they in? If one reads the Qur’an and, say, the earliest collection of Hadith (by Bukhari) side by side, it is impossible to know if the two texts are talking about the same space and time. Unlike the Qur’an, they do not claim inspiration. But they lack the authority of scripture.

They are a body of sayings (“saying” = “hadith”) about (1) how Muslims were living their lives and (2) supposed events in the sacred time, the time of revelation, of its prophet. In contrast, ahadith are traditions about supposed events and practices in the early Muslim community. The texts not only point to revelation, but are themselves revelatory. The latter is doubly revelatory: presumptively inspired revelations, bearing the narrative of revelation. It is a history.Įven more so, Hadith and the Jewish-Christian scriptures have very different relationships to the sacred time they describe. Biblical revelation is neither simply a text nor an event. Furthermore, beyond the revelation of God in Jesus, the Christian scriptures continued as the unwinding epiphany of the “Christ event,” the revelation of Jesus Christ in the first two or three generations of Christians (“Christ-ians”). That is why, once European scholarship discovered the historicity of knowledge, that Christians and Jews had to make use of historical criticism. Only because the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob had already revealed himself to the Jews were the first Christians able to come to believe that the God revealed in the scriptures had also revealed himself in Jesus, now revealed as Christ. Thus the whole of Jewish history, life, and their experience of God is part and parcel of that revelation.

The entirety of the Jewish canon lay at hand before, what is for Christians, the revelation of God in Jesus Christ. It is not true that the Bible came into existence after revelation. As it affirms again and again, it enters experience as a book ( al-kitab), and precisely as a book it can be analyzed even while (for a Muslim) maintaining its revelatory status.įurthermore, the analogy between hadith and the Bible is seriously flawed.

In the same manner, the belief that the Qur’an is the “very reality of revelation” does not protect it from critical historical examination of how that revelation entered into human experience. The historian of Christian dogma, who is himself a Christian, can undertake this analysis without compromising his faith in the dogmatic symbol as fully and truly expressive of what is, for him, the “very reality of revelation.” From the opening transformation of Jesus from Jewish messiah to the Christos of Pauline doctrine, to the complex theological formulations of the later ecumenical creeds, we can analyze the development of the symbol and root it in specific spiritual, liturgical, social, and political forces. “Christ” as a dogmatic symbol has a history. To claim that the so-called history of the Koran undermines or casts doubt on its being a divine revelation is not only to misunderstand the nature of the Koran but also to go against the historical evidence.Įven if it is true that the Qur’an in Islam is the very reality of revelation, analogous to Christ in Christianity, it does not follow that this immediate revelation is not open to historical criticism. Both the hadith books and the Bible were compiled after the revelation, whereas the Koran has existed in its present form from the very beginning of Islamic revelation. The rules of biblical criticism do not apply to the Koran as God’s revelation, because what corresponds to the Bible is the hadith collection, which comprises the words and deeds of the Prophet of Islam as the Bible comprises the words and deeds of Jesus Christ. The acceptance of the Koran as the word of God suggests that the so-called historical and textual study of the Koran is tantamount to questioning the historical existence of Jesus Christ, as some people in the West have claimed. In response to a well-known examination of the historical problems of The Koran, written before 9-11 by Toby Lester in The Atlantic, Seyyed Hossein Nasr said

Quran textual criticism