The study of islam post-1969 and John Wansbrough

Submitted by dhimmi no more (United States), Jul 9, 2011 at 08:29

I suspect that most of the readers are not familiar with John Wansbrough's work on the history of early Islam and I will try and do my best to present to the readers what Wansbrough is really saying because he really changed our understanding of the history of early islam and even those that do not like his conclusions admire very much this great scholar.

In his two books written in the 1970's: quranic studies sources and methods of scritural interpretation and the second book is sectarian milieu content and composition of islamic salvation history, he was able to go beyond the conclusions by both Ignaz Goldziher and Jospeh Schacht and in the words of Herbert Berg: he severed both the koran and the sira from the figure muhammad and even from arabia and placed the origin of islam where it belongs and that is in Mesopotamia during the time of the early Abbassids.

One word of advise these two books are really very difficult to read and to understand what he is really saying, the reader has to know his Arabic as well as Greek and Hebrew and Syriac and German and Latin and must be familiar with Biblical literary criticism, the history of the late antique Middle East as well as the historical method. But the reader will be amazed with this great scholar

What Wansbrough did is very interesting. He applied the tools of literay criticism to the whole very early Islamic sources be it the Qur'an and the sira and the Quranic exegesis. And yes one can regard his work as no more than a study in early Arabic literature but it is really grounded in explaining "what really happened" which makes his books indeed books about history.

It has been known for a long time that the islamic sources are late and tendentious but he goes beyond such facts and he proves that these literary sources are no more than salvation history and not what historians are looking for which is "what really happened."

Oh Salvation history? It is really a nice way of saying pious fiction and not real history

In his literary examination of the Qur'an he comes to the conclusion that what we have in the Qur'an is "a corpus of familiar scripture (read this as the Bible) was being pressed in the service of as yet unfamiliar doctrine (read this as the Qur'an." And in the words of Berg: "in fact the earliest exegesis that was responsible for linking the anonymous Koranic material (or logias) to the figure of the independent Arabian prophet this early exegesis produced the biography of Muhammad the logia's contribution to this process was to give the arabian prophet a distinct mosaic character while the evangelium placed the logia in the Hijaz."

In other words it was really a case of reversing cause for effect and no more

Now I will select at random a few issues that I regard as very significant in what Wansbrough is saying

1. I believe that his suggestion that historiography is no more than literature and should be approached as literature and the tools of literary criticism should be used to approach such texts as one of his best suggestions. He also stresses that argument from silence can be utilized when the extant evidenece is not there as in the case of al-Hijaz prior to islam where we do not have any extant literary sources monuments, papyri, ostraca or epigraphy that attest to the veracity of what Muslim historians are saying and that what we have here in the case of islam is only literary evidence written in distant Mesopotamia 2-3 centuries about events that took place in very distant Mecca and Medina some 300 years before

2. What is really the Qur'an? If by the Qur'an we mean the 1923-1924 Cairo Qur'an or even the 1969 Tunisian Qur'an then we have a problem as the evidence we have is that Quranic logias and pericopes written in the defective rasm had to be put in a book form and had to be edited by adding the missing vowels both long and short and adding the missing consonants and then trying to check the grammar and syntax and this is what the Islamic masora (read this as reading the Qur'an as a literary text and fixing the words and grammar and syntax and masora is a Hebrew word) was all about and we know that the Muslim masora as an activity can be dated to the third century of islam and we know that the likes of al-Tabari was working with a text but he also was working on establishing what the defective rasm (the layer of the Qur'an that lacks the short and at times long vowels and the double consonants and the dots as the letter beh can be read as a theh or a teh) and we know that the text was not yet stable and you can see it in the case of Q105 where al-Tabari called surat al-lam tara and now it is called surat al-feel and you can also see it in the difference between the Cairo Qur'an and the Tunisian Qur'an

So what Wansbrough is saying here is that the Qur'an could not have been canonized before the stabilization of the Arabic grammar and syntax and language and this was achieved during the activity known as the Muslim masora which means that the Qur'an was canonized in the 3rd century of Islam and not any earlier

More evidence that the Qur'an could nlot have been canonized before the 3rd century of Islam? The Qur'an is not used as a source of islamic law in the very early books of islamic law as in the case of Fiqh Akbar 1 (circa 750CE) and also as was pointed out by Schacht that islamic law posterior to al-Shaf3ee tells us that the punishment of al-zani wa al-zania is al-rajm or stoning but if you turn to the Qur'an you will find it to be al-jald or the whipping which means that what was canonized (al-jald) was posterior to Fiqh Akbar 1 which indeed confirms what Wansbrough is saying that there were indeed circulating logias and pericopes and for reasons unknown some were selected and some were not

3. Anyone who reads the Qur'an and knows his Arabic will come across words that have no meaning and no one has a clue what such words means not back then and not now as in the case of the very celebrated words ilaf and kalala and those mysterious people known as ahl al-ayka or layka. But the failure of the islamic historical tradition to explain such phenomenon leads us to one of the following conclusions and they are: Either the Quranic material pre-dates Muhammad (which detaches Muhammad from the Qur'an) or that such Quranic material was only circulating logias and pericopes and by the time they were canonized in the 3rd century in Mesopotamia no one had a clue what they really mean (which detaches islam from al-Hijaz). He indeed makes us wonder

4. He also explains a very puzzling Quranic phenomenon which he calls variant traditions and it is why does Allah seem to repeat himself often as in the two gardens tradition or the Shu3ayb tradition and what he tells us is that and in the words of Michael Cook " we might have here the results of the development of independent possibly regional traditions incorporated more or less intact into the canonical compilation" which means that the Qur'an has multiple authors.

5. He also comes to the conclusion that the extant islamic sources and the extant non islamic sources cannot help us in answering the question posed by historians "what really happened" and the turth is we really do not know and will never know what really happened and that the islamic historical tradition has no answers either. This is indeed a warning to all of us that study the history of early Islam

So in summary what he is saying is that the Qur'an does not come from the Hijaz and it was not canonized before the 3rd century of Islam and islam is the end product of debates in a Judeo-Christian Milieu in distant Mesopotamia in the late second and thrid century of islam. Muhammad? He deos not really say it but he seems to have his doubts that there was indeed an historical character called Muhammad

So in two books Wansbrough was able to challenge and change our understanding of the history of early islam

In tne next post I will review the status of the study of early islam post Wansbrough

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