Page 326 - History of The Quranic Text | Kalamullah.Com

306 THE HISTORY OF THE QUR'ANIC TEXT

These exegeses take up over half the book, yet if I were to approach
any Muslim scholar living in the East or even educated in the West, he
would not be able to decipher even the table of contents. Yes, perhaps a
rabbi can decode this OT terminology, but this is akin to placing a rabbi's
garbs on a Muslim sheikh. Why this insistence on transmuting Islam, except
to force it beyond the scope of Muslim scholars and imply its derivation
from Jewish and Christian sources?

4. OrientalistAccusations of Appropriation

This leads us to a third gateway for an assault on the Qur'an: the recurrent
accusations levelled against Islam as merely a forgery ofJudaism and Chris-
tianity, a fraudulent offshoot appropriating Scriptural literature for its own
purposes. Wansbrough, himself a fIrm proponent of this idea, insisted for
example that "Islamic Doctrine generally, and even the figure of Muhammad
were modelled on RabbinicJewish prototype."? Here we examine the senti-
ments of two scholars writing in a similar vein.

i. Accusations of Botched Appropriation

In an Encyclopaedia Britannica (1891) article N oldeke, a pioneer Orientalist,
mentions numerous errors in the Qur'an due to the "ignorance of Mu-
hammad" concerning earlyJewish history - a supposed bungling of names
and details which he stole fromJewish sources." Tabulating these mistakes
he states that,

[Even the] most ignorantJew could never have mistaken Haman (the
minister of Ahasuerus)for the minister of Pharaoh, or identifiedMiriam
the sisterof Moses with Mary (= Miriam) the mother of Christ.... [And]
in his ignorance of everything out of Arabia, he makes the fertility of
Egypt - where rain is almost never seen and never missed - depend
on rain instead of the inundations of the Nile (xii. 49).9

7 See R.S. Humphreys, Islamic History: A Framework for Inquiry, Revised edition,
Princeton Univ. Press, 1991,p. 84.
8 See "The Koran", Encyclopaedia Britannica, 9th edition, 1891, vol. 16, pp. 597ff.
Reprinted in Ibn Warraq (ed.), The Origins of the Koran: Classic Essays on Islam's Holy
Book, Prometheus Books, Amherst, NY, 1998,pp. 36-63.
9 T. Noldeke, "The Koran", in Ibn Warraq (ed.), The Origins ofthe Koran, p. 43.