Spoerl / The Levantine Review Volume 2 Number 1 (Spring 2013)
and the last day and enjoin good conduct and forbid evil and vie with one another in good works. Those are the righteous….” On Ibn Ishaq’s interpretation, these verses refer only to a small group of Jews who had converted to Islam: Abdullah bin Sallam, Thalaba bin Saya, and Usayd bin Saya (p. 262).[1] In other words, the message is that the only good Jews are those who convert to Islam. Ibn Ishaq’s influence can be traced centuries later in one of the most respected commentaries on the Koran, the Tafsir of Ibn Kathir (1301-1373). Ibn Kathir writes of verses 3:113ff:
Muhammad bin Ishaq and others…said ; ‘These Ayat [verses] were revealed about the clergy of the People of the Scriptures who embraced the faith. For instance, there is Abdullah bin Salam, Asad bin Ubayd, Thalabah bin Sayah, Usayd bin Sayah, and so forth. This Ayah [verse] means that those among the People of the Book whom Allah rebuked earlier [in 3:111] are not at all the same as those among them who embraced Islam.[2]
Sura 109 is another set of verses that seem to convey an attitude of religious tolerance: “Say, O disbelievers, I do not worship what you worship, and you do not worship what I worship […] You have your religion, and I have mine.” According to Ibn Ishaq, these verses were revealed in Mecca before the hijra when Muhammad was in a position of weakness and when he was under pressure to adopt a syncretistic compromise with the polytheists who were persecuting him. A group of polytheists came to Muhammad and made this proposal: “Muhammad, come let us worship what you worship, and you worship what we worship. [….] If what you worship is better than what we worship we will take a share in it, and if what we worship is better than what you worship, you can take a share of that” (p. 165). Ibn Ishaq makes it clear that Muhammad’s response was an emphatic rejection of any compromise between strict monotheism and the polytheism of the Quraysh. Sura 109 is not an endorsement of religious tolerance, then, but a rejection of syncretism. Moreover, the revelation of 9:5 some years later in 631 would entail complete and total intolerance for any sort of polytheism in Arabia.[3] Ibn Ishaq also places the revelation of Sura 109 in the context of the “Satanic verses,” an episode that also led to an emphatic rejection of syncretism after a brief and mistaken flirtation with the idea by Muhammad (pp. 165-7). It
- ↑ In general the Koran is quite sparing in its praise of the “people of the book” and always counter-balances its tepid praise with much harsher criticism. Typical verses assert “Some are true believers, but most are evildoers” (3:110); “you will find them ever deceitful except for a few of them” (5:13); “People of the Book…most of you are evil-doers” (5:56); “There are some among them who are righteous men; but there are many among them who do nothing but evil” (5:66).
- ↑ Shaykh Safiur-Rahman Al-Mubarakpuri et al., eds., second edition, Tafsir Ibn Kathir (abridged) (Riyadh: Darussalam, 2003), Volume 2, p. 246.
- ↑ F.E. Peters, Muhammad and the Origins of Islam, p. 244, and Reuven Firestone, Jihad: The Origins of Holy War in Islam (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 88-89.
