Spoerl / The Levantine Review Volume 2 Number 1 (Spring 2013)
The apostle said: ‘I am the first to revive the order of God and His book and to practice it.’ They were duly stoned […]” (p. 267). In another version of the same story in Ibn Ishaq, we are told that “the most learned man living in the Torah,” the rabbi Abdullah bin Suriya, tells Muhammad privately, “Yes, […] they [the Jews] know right well […] that you are a prophet sent (by God) but they envy you” (p.267). The moral of the story is clear: The Jews cannot be trusted to give an honest account of the contents of their own holy books, either when it comes to the punishment for adultery, or the foretelling of Muhammad’s coming as a prophet.
It is interesting to contrast the sira (and also the Koran) with the classical Islamic doctrine of revelation. According to classical Islamic doctrine, the Torah and Gospel were originally revealed by God to Moses and Jesus, respectively, but were corrupted by subsequent generations of Jews and Christians, so that in their current versions they are not authentic divine revelations (the doctrine of tahrif).[1] However, neither the sira nor the Koran unambiguously affirms this doctrine. In the passages quoted above, we are told repeatedly that the Jews of Muhammad’s time know that their scriptures foretell Muhammad’s coming and lie in denying this. They are portrayed as dishonest, like the rabbis who denied that stoning is the revealed penalty for adultery, not as the unwitting victims of textual tampering by earlier generations of Jews.[2] Of course, many of the passages in the sira and Koran are inherently ambiguous: accusations that the Jews suppress or change the word of God could be construed as suggesting the classical Islamic doctrine of tahrif, but the overall picture drawn by Ibn Ishaq strongly suggests that Muhammad’s accusation was that the Jews of his day were simply lying about what they knew to be in their holy books.[3]
- ↑ “The obligation of belief [in Allah’s inspired books] applies to the original revelations, not the various scriptures in the hands of non-Muslims, which are textually corrupt in their present form.” Ahmad ibn Naqib al-Misri, The Reliance of the Traveller: A Classic Manual of Islamic Sacred Law, trans. Nuh Ha Mim Keller, rev. ed. (Beltsville, MD: 1994), p. 811. Camilla Adang explains that there is in fact a diversity of opinion in the Islamic tradition on this matter, some Muslim scholars affirming that Jews and Christians have actually corrupted the texts of their scriptures (tahrif al-nass) and others only stressing a difference of interpretation without suggesting the corruption of the text (tahrif al-ma’ani). Camila Adang, Muslim Writers on Judaism and the Hebrew Bible: From Ibn Rabban to Ibn Hazm (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1996), pp. 223-248.
- ↑ In contrast, Ibn Hazm (ca. 994-1064) does portray the Jews as “unwitting victims of a deceitful or unwitting forbear.” This, however, does not prevent him from subjecting the Jews to the most offensively vituperative stereotyping: Theodore Pulcini, Exegesis as Polemical Discourse: Ibn Hazm on Jewish and Christian Scriptures (Atlanta: The American Academy of Religion, 1998), pp. 132-134.
- ↑ Gordon Darnell Newby suggests the the classical doctrine of tahrif only emerged some years after the composition of Ibn Ishaq’s sira: Newby, The Making of the Last Prophet, p. 12. Tor Andrae mistakenly asserts: “When the Jews disputed his claim that the Arabian
