Published in: Mohammedanism, A Historical Survey H.A.R. Gibb, London: Oxford University Press, [1950] (pages 36-47).

The Koran

H.A.R. Gibb

THE KORAN is the record of those formal utterances and discourses which Mohammed and his followers accepted as directly inspired. Muslim orthodoxy therefore regards them as the literal Word of God mediated through the angel Gabriel. They are quoted with the prefix ‘God has said’, the phrase ‘The Prophet said’ is applied only to the sayings of Mohammed preserved in the Traditions. Mohammed’s own belief, which is still held without question by his followers, was that these discourses were portions of a ‘Heavenly Book’ sent down to or upon him in an Arabic version, not as a whole, but in sections of manageable length and in relation to the circumstances of the moment.

In outward form the Koran is a book of some 300 pages, divided into 114 chapters, called suras, arranged roughly in order of length, except for the short prayer which constitutes Sura i. Sura ii has 286 verses, Sura iii 200, and so on down to the final suras, which have only three to five short verses. As the Medinian suras are generally the longer ones the order is not chronological; and the difficulty of rearranging them in chronological order is increased by the fact that most of the Medinian and many of the Meccan suras are composite, containing discourses of different periods bound up together. Apart from the relatively few allusions to exactly dated historical events, the principal evidences are supplied by general criteria of style and content.

In the earliest period of his preaching Mohammed’s utterances were delivered in a sinewy oracular style cast into short rhymed phrases, often obscure and sometimes preceded by one or more formal oaths. This style is admittedly that of the ancient kahins or Arabian oracle-mongers, and it is not surprising that Mohammed’s opponents should have charged him with being just another such kahin. For this and other reasons his style gradually loosened out into a simpler but still rhetorical prose; and as social denunciations and eschatological visions passed into historical narrative, and that in turn at Medina into legislation and topical addresses, little was left of its original stylistic features but a loose rhyme or assonance marking the end of each verse, now anything from ten to sixty words long.

Carlyle’s dictum on the Koran: ‘It is as toilsome reading as I ever undertook, a wearisome, confused jumble, crude, incondite. Nothing but a sense of duty could carry any European through the Koran’ puts succinctly what must indeed be the first impression of any reader. But years of close study confirm his further judgment that in it there is a merit quite other than the literary one. If a book come from the heart, it will contrive to reach other hearts; all art and authorcraft are of small account to that. Though, to be sure, the question of literary merit is one not to be judged on a priori grounds but in relation to the genius of the Arabic language; and no man in fifteen hundred years has ever played on that deep-toned instrument with such power, such boldness, and such range of emotional effect as Mohammed did.

In trying to trace the sources and development of the religious ideas expounded in the Koran (a question, be it remembered, not only meaningless but blasphemous in Muslim eyes), we are still confronted with many unsolved problems. Earlier scholars postulated a Jewish source with some Christian additions. More recent research has conclusively proved that the main external influences (including the Old Testament materials) can be traced back to Syriac Christianity.

It is now well known that there were organized Jewish and Christian churches amongst the settled communities in the north, the south, and the east of Arabia. The Arab town of Hira on the Euphrates was the seat of a Nestorian bishopric which almost certainly conducted some kind of missionary activity in Arabia, and there are many references in old Arabic poetry to hermits living in lonely cells in the wilderness. In the Yemen a Jewish or Judaizing movement supported by the local dynasty was overthrown by the Yemenite Christians with Abyssinian aid in A.D. 525. In view of the close commercial relations between Mecca and the Yemen it would be natural to assume that some religious ideas were carried to Mecca with the caravans of spices and woven stuffs, and there are details of vocabulary in the Koran which give colour to this assumption.

From the Koran itself it is clear that monotheistic ideas were familiar in Western Arabia. The existence of a supreme God, Allah, is assumed as an axiom common to Mohammed and his opponents. The Koran never argues the point; what it does argue is that He is the one and only God. La ilaha illa’llah, ‘there is no god but Allah.’

But it is more doubtful whether this is to be regarded as the direct deposit of Christian or Jewish teaching. In the Koran it is connected with a different tradition altogether, an obscure Arabian tradition represented by the so-called hanifs - pre-Islamic Arab monotheists whose very name shows that the Syrians regarded them as non-Christians (Syriac hanpa; ‘heathen’). Mohammed glories in the name and attaches it as a distinctive epithet to Abraham, who was neither Jew nor Christian. There is even a suggestion in an early variant reading of a Koranic verse (iii, v. 17) that at one time Hanifiyya was used to denote the doctrine preached by Mohammed and was only later replaced by Islam.

A further trace of this native North-Arabian prophetic tradition is found in the early passages of the Koran which refer to or recount the missions of former prophets. In these narratives certain obscure Arabian figures - Hud, Shu’aib and others - take a place at least as prominent as the prophets of the Old Testament. The earliest references assume that the stories of these prophets were familiar to Mohammed’s hearers and indeed one or two of them are mentioned in pre-Islamic verses.

But while granting this native monotheistic tradition as an integral element in Mohammed’s background of ideas, the doctrine which most powerfully gripped him (and which, through him, was most vividly impressed upon the mind of Islam in all later ages) was the doctrine of the Last Judgment. This was certainly not derived from the Arabian tradition, but from Christian sources. The profound disbelief and scornful sarcasms with which it was received by his Meccan fellow-citizens show that it was a wholly unfamiliar idea to them. On the other hand, not only the ideas expressed by Mohammed about the resurrection of the physical body and the future life, but also many of the details about the process of the Judgment and even the pictorial presentation of the joys of Paradise and torments of Hell, as well as several of the special technical terms employed in the Koran, are closely paralleled in the writings of the Syriac Christian fathers and monks.

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Tags: Allah, Arabia, ayat, jewish, language, Prophet, Quran, religion, Scripture, sura