The Qur’an’s Engagement with Christian and Jewish Literature
بِسْمِ اللهِ الرَّحْمٰنِ الرَّحِيْمِ
Introduction
The Qur’an is God’s final revelation and the ultimate source of spiritual guidance for humanity. One of the primary ways in which it imparts this guidance is through narrative, by frequently telling stories of the past in order to instruct both its historical audience and subsequent generations. Since the Qur’an is a confirmation and continuation of earlier revelations known to the Jewish and Christian communities (e.g., 2:97, 3:3, 20:133), its stories are seldom entirely unfamiliar, but instead find strong echoes in previous Jewish and Christian traditions. These traditions are contained not only in the Bible, but also in a rich corpus of extra-biblical traditions transmitted, elaborated on, and recorded by the Jewish and Christian communities over many centuries, frequently interpreting, expanding on, or adding to biblical narratives. The Qur’an often engages with these extra-biblical traditions just as it engages with the Bible itself.
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This feature, which is so prominent in the Qur’an, is known as “intertextuality”—that is, the engagement of one text with other texts and traditions. For example, Qur’an 10:98 alludes to the repentance of the “people of Jonah” (qawm Yūnus), a reference that is more fully understood when read against the background of the story found in the biblical Book of Jonah. Similarly, the account of the bowing of the angels to Adam after his creation in Sūrah al-Baqarah finds parallels in Christian and Jewish stories about Adam circulating several centuries before the revelation of the Qur’an.
Muslim scholarship has long sought to draw upon biblical tradition to understand the Qur’an, a trend that has also arisen in Western academia over recent decades. The works of hadith and tafsīr contain plentiful reports according to which early exegetes, most notably the Prophet Muhammad’s ﷺ cousin and disciple Ibn ʿAbbās, narrated traditions of Jewish and Christian provenance, known as isrāʾīliyyāt, when commenting on stories of the prophets. While hadith literature contains some reports of the Prophet ﷺ or his companions criticizing the use of Jewish and Christian traditions, the general policy towards these traditions is embodied in the Prophet’s ﷺ authentically transmitted statements “Narrate from the Children of Israel—there is no problem,”
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and “Do not believe or disbelieve in the People of the Scripture.”
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That is, Jewish and Christian traditions can be referred to as sources of information, but they cannot be used as standards for the doctrines or practice of one’s religion without further verification. Hence, the use of isrāʾīliyyāt was a common practice in early Muslim tafsīr.
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To cite just one example, Qur’an 19:56-57 reads, “Mention in the scripture Idrīs. He was a man of truth, a prophet, and We raised him to a high station.” Many early tafsīrs identified the figure of Idrīs with the biblical Enoch, concerning whom the Bible says, “Enoch walked with God; then he was no more, because God took him” (Genesis 5:24). In his explanation of the Qur’anic verses, al-Ṭabarī cites a variety of narrations according to which Idrīs was transported to heaven by an angel, an idea found in numerous pre-Islamic Jewish and Christian traditions about Enoch.
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While early Muslim exegetes drew on isrāʾīliyyāt to provide further background to Qur’anic allusions to stories of biblical figures, early Western scholarship on Qur’anic intertextuality sought to uncover the presumed “sources” of the Qur’an, viewing it as an essentially derivative work comprised of confused adaptations of biblical and extra-biblical lore. Such an attitude is reflected in the very title of Abraham Geiger’s pioneering 1833 book, Was hat Mohammed aus dem Judentume aufgenommen? (“What did Muhammad borrow from Judaism?”) Western Qur’anic studies has since seen a paradigm shift away from its polemical origins. Rather than attempting to reduce the Qur’an to alleged “sources,” most contemporary scholars in the field seek to understand how the Qur’an closely engages with and critiques the traditions that were current among its Jewish and Christian audiences from its own autonomous standpoint—presenting, in the words of one scholar, “corrective retellings” of these traditions.
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In keeping with this newer approach, Sidney Griffith remarks that “[the Qur’an] cannot be reduced to any presumed sources. Earlier discourses appear in it not only in a new setting, but shaped, trimmed and re-formulated for an essentially new narrative.”
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This approach acknowledges the Qur’an as “a text of its own… possessed of its own peculiar theological agenda and literary logic,” which cannot therefore simply be reduced to its presumed “sources.”
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Western scholarship has thus begun to appreciate the Qur’an’s corrective role over previous traditions, a role which is described by the Revelation itself:
We have revealed to you this Book with the truth, as a confirmation of previous Scriptures and a supreme authority on them (muhaymin ʿalayh). (5:48)
As the classical Qur’anic scholar al-Thaʿālibī (d. 875/1470) explains, the Qur’an’s status as “muhaymin,” or “authoritative over” previous revelations entails that it “confirms that which is true” in them, while also “reinstating the truth and counteracting [whatever] corruption [is found therein].”
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The idea that the Qur’an both affirms and corrects previously corrupted scripture was articulated by Muslim scholarship even before modern notions of Qur’anic intertextuality. But how, specifically, does the Qur’an both affirm and correct previously circulating accounts?
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