5 Western scholars of Islam and where Muslims differ with them

Geiger, a German rabbi and a leading figure in Reform Judaism, wrote a prize essay in 1833, Was hat Mohammed aus dem Judenthume aufgenommen? (“What did Muhammad take over from Judaism?”). He gathered Quranic stories, terms and rules that have parallels in the Bible, the Talmud and the Midrash, and argued that the Quran borrows from Jewish sources.^[2] Later European scholars took up the question he posed.

Muslim scholars answer that the Quran says it confirms earlier scripture and stands as a guardian over it, and that it describes its own message as present in the scriptures of former peoples, including those of Abraham and Moses.^[3] On that account similarity is what its own claim predicts. They also note that Geiger’s argument starts from the assumption it sets out to prove: a parallel shows a common source, and only a prior decision that Muhammad (peace be upon him) composed the text turns it into a debt. The parallels themselves are real, and nobody needs to deny them.

Caetani, an Italian prince and historian, wrote Annali dell’Islam, a ten-volume chronological history of early Islam, built on the Arabic sources.^[4] He arranged the reports year by year, set rival accounts side by side, and was sceptical about many of them. He worked in the wake of Ignaz Goldziher, whose studies of hadith (the reports of the Prophet’s words and deeds) around 1890 argued that a large share of them reflect the disputes of later generations.^[5]

The value of his work is the collection of material, which scholars of every persuasion still consult. Muslim scholars reply that the science of hadith criticism, with its study of chains and narrators, answers the problem of reliability. Its scholars graded narrators for memory and honesty, compared versions, and rejected a great many reports, some of them popular. They add that Caetani did not engage that science on its own terms. The strongest form of his objection remains: a sound chain shows who passed a report on, and a sceptic can still ask about the first link. The reply is that independent chains carrying the same content make coordinated invention hard to sustain.

Jeffery, an Australian professor in Cairo and New York, produced Materials for the History of the Text of the Qur’an (1937), a collection of variant readings from early codices and commentaries, and The Foreign Vocabulary of the Qur’an (1938), listing words of non-Arabic origin.^[6] Together they were used to argue that the text was less fixed, and its language less purely Arabic, than Muslims believe.

Muslim scholars answer that variant readings (qirāʾāt) were catalogued by Muslims long before Jeffery. The Prophet is reported to have said that the Quran was sent down in seven modes,^[7] and the tradition preserves a set of recognised readings, each traced through reciters back to him. The non-standard readings Jeffery gathered were known to classical scholars, who set them aside once Uthman’s standard copies were circulated.

On loanwords the question is old. Al-Shafii denied in his Risala that the Quran contains any non-Arabic word, while others allowed a few foreign words that Arabic had absorbed, as al-Suyuti records in al-Itqan.^[8] Arabic, like any language, has loanwords, and the Quran’s claim to be in “clear Arabic” refers to its clarity.^[9]

Goitein, a German-born scholar of the Jewish tradition who taught in Jerusalem and Princeton, spent his career on the Cairo Geniza, the huge cache of medieval documents, and wrote A Mediterranean Society, a work in six volumes.^[10] His work shows ordinary Jewish and Muslim life in the medieval world: trade, marriage, letters, quarrels. The documents are written by merchants and clerks with no thought of a later audience, which gives them unusual weight.

Muslim historians cite his picture of Jews and Muslims living and trading together as evidence of the tolerance of the medieval Islamic world. The Quran lays down the principle: God does not forbid kindness and justice towards those who have not fought the believers over religion.^[11] A fair reading adds a qualification. Jews in the Geniza world lived under the legal limits that applied to non-Muslims, and the historian Mark Cohen has argued against both the myth of an interfaith utopia and the myth of constant persecution.^[12] The Geniza supports the claim that coexistence was real and ordinary, which is a more modest claim than perfect equality.

Armstrong, a British writer and former nun, wrote Muhammad: A Biography of the Prophet (1991) and later works, including a short history of Islam.^[13] She presents the Prophet as a man of religious and social purpose, and Islam as a religion of mercy. She has criticised hostility to Islam in the West, and her books reach readers who would never open a work of academic orientalism.

Her admirers are many among Muslims, who value an author with a wide readership who corrects common caricatures. Some Muslim scholars respond that a sympathetic outsider still cannot say what it means to be a believer. She writes as a historian of religion, so the claim at the centre of Muslim faith, that the Quran is the speech of God, stays outside her account. Some critics in the West argue the opposite, that her portrait is too gentle. A reader can use her as a first introduction and then turn to the sources.