Download PDF | Tarif Khalidi - The Muslim Jesus_ Sayings and Stories in Islamic Literature-Harvard University Press (2003).
262 Pages
The Muslim Gospel
The Arabic Islamic literary tradition of the premodern period contains several hundred sayings and stories ascribed to Jesus. What I have entitled The Muslim Jesus is a collection of these sayings and stories. As a whole, they form the largest body of texts relating to Jesus in any non-Christian literature. In referring to this body of literature, I shall henceforth use the phrase “Muslim gospel.”
In bringing this collection together and presenting it to Western readers, my aim is primarily to introduce an image of Jesus little known outside Arabic Islamic culture. It is an image that might be of interest to those who wish to understand how Jesus was perceived by a religious tradition which greatly revered him but rejected his divinity. Hence, the Jesus presented here will in some ways be similar to the Jesus of the Christian Gospels, in others not. How and why this Muslim gospel arose is the subject of this Introduction.
The Muslim gospel is not found as a complete corpus in any one Arabic Islamic source. Rather, it is scattered in works of ethics and popular devotion, works of Adab (belles-lettres), works of Sufism or Muslim mysticism, anthologies of wisdom, and histories of prophets and saints. The sources range in time from the second/eighth century to the twelfth/eighteenth century.’ As regards the sayings and stories, these vary in size from a single sentence to a story of several hundred words. They circulated in Arabic Islamic literature and lore all the way from Spain to China, and some of them remain familiar to educated Muslims today.!
Almost without exception, these sayings are very well crafted from the literary and linguistic points of view. Great care must doubtless have been taken by those who circulated them to fashion words and stories worthy of a figure known in the Qur’an and in the Muslim tradition as the “Spirit of God” and the “Word of God.” A saying such as “Blessed is he who sees with his heart but whose heart is not in what he sees,” or “Be at ease with people and ill at ease with yourself,” could well have been spoken by the Jesus of the Gospels. Where do these sayings and stories come from? The first and simple answer would be that they belong to the common age-old fund of wisdom found in the rich traditions of Near Eastern cultures. As will be shown below, and in greater detail in the commentaries, some of them are echoes of the Gospels, canonical and extracanonical, but many also seem to have their roots in what may broadly be called Hellenistic civilization.
It is my intention to attempt to trace the origins of as many of them as possible. But given the diversity and richness of the materials in question, it would be a difficult task to accomplish in its totality. Other students of this gospel will no doubt be able to unearth parallels and thereby enrich our understanding of these sayings and stories. Their exact number is unknown. Although commented upon by Western scholars since at least the eighteenth century, it was not until 1896 that the English orientalist David Margoliouth published a collection of seventy-seven of these sayings, translated mostly from one source. Twenty-three years later, in 1919, the Spanish orientalist Miguel Asin y Palacios collected and published 225 sayings, translating them into Latin and providing brief Latin commentaries.
For his collection, Asin scoured fifty-six classical Arabic sources. The Asin collection has thus far remained the basic corpus of the Muslim gospel. When I began to collect these sayings some years ago, three considerations were uppermost. First, neither Margoliouth nor Asin nor any other collector had been able to examine several sayings and stories in a number of early Islamic texts which have recently come to light. Prominent among these texts are several works of piety, some of which date back as early as the second/ eighth century and contain the earliest sayings of the Muslim Jesus so far known to us.
This allows us to chart the origins and evolution of the Muslim gospel more thoroughly than before. Second, neither Margoliouth nor Asin nor any later scholar has devoted much attention to the literary aspects of the Muslim gospel, nor to its historical function and place in the evolution of Muslim piety in general. What we have in this gospel are successive portraits of Jesus of intrinsic literary and theological interest—a Jesus resurrected in an environment where he becomes a Muslim prophet, yet retains an identity not incongruent with what we find in the canonical Gospels. In his new environment, Jesus was to play a role of considerable importance in formulating or fortifying certain Muslim definitions of piety, religious responsibility, and attitudes to government.
Third, and despite the vast modern literature on ChristianMuslim relations and the images of Jesus in the Qur’an, the Hadith (or Muslim “traditions”), and other religious texts of Islam, surprisingly little attention has been paid to the overall impact of these sayings and stories on Muslim perceptions of Christianity.‘ For educated Muslims of the pre-modern period, at least, this gospel was (with the exception of the Qur’an and Hadith) where they were most likely to encounter the figure of Jesus. Accordingly, no account of the place which Jesus occupies in the Muslim literary tradition as a whole can ignore the salience of the Muslim gospel.
If we ask about the significance of this gospel for the contemporary and ongoing dialogue between Christianity and Islam, we might point to its relevance to historical and theological reconciliation and to the long-enduring search for a community of witness. In its totality, this gospel is the story of a love affair between Islam and Jesus and is thus a unique record of how one world religion chose to adopt the central figure of another, coming to recognize him as constitutive of its own identity. This work is addressed to both specialist and nonspecialist readers. It is divided into two parts. The first, the Introduction, provides an overall historical and literary framework for these sayings and stories.
The second consists of the gospel itself. The sayings are numbered and arranged in chronological order, and most are followed by bio-bibliographical references and commentary. Readers who are not particularly interested in the historical and theological context may wish to proceed straightway to the second part, where they can encounter the Muslim gospel directly and come to their own conclusions as to its literary or theological merits.
The Background The Islamic image of Jesus first took shape in the Qur’an, and it is from here that the Muslim gospel emanates. Although the Jesus of the Muslim gospel takes on an identity quite different from the one found in the Qur’an, the Qur’anic Jesus remains an important basis of his later manifestations. Much has been written on Jesus as he appears in the Qur’an, and no startling originality is claimed for this section of the Introduction. However, we must anchor our subject in its own Islamic environment before we proceed to an examination of the corpus of the gospel itself. It is now commonly recognized that Islam was born in a time and place where the figure of Jesus was widely known.
From inscriptions, from Syriac, Ethiopic, and Byzantine sources, from modern analyses of pre-Islamic Arabian poetry, from newly discovered early Islamic materials, a picture is emerging of a preIslamic Arabia where diverse Christian communities, in Arabia itself or in its immediate vicinity, purveyed rich and diverse images of Jesus. It is well to remember that when Islam arrived on the scene of history, the Church of the Great Councils had not yet enforced its dogmas in the Near East. In other words, Islam was born amid many, often mutually hostile Christian communities and not in the bosom of a universal church. In addition to a multifaceted Christianity, there was also an Arabian Judaic presence, of uncertain doctrinal orientation.
But we should keep in mind here also that the Judaism projected in Arabia was a diffuse amalgam of scripture, lore, and myth. Arabia on the eve of Islam, a decentralized zone of the Hellenistic world, must be thought of as the home of a rich diversity of religious traditions, the Christian and the Jewish being merely the two most thoroughly examined by modern scholarship. However, the starting point for the examination of these sayings and stories will be the Qur'an, and not pre-Islamic Ara bia.> As a foundation text, the Qur’an inaugurated a new synthesis, a new deployment of religious language and beliefs. Where the Qur’anic Jesus is concerned, Western scholarship has generally sought to trace the filaments of influence underpinning that image. Less work has been done on the structure or formal analysis of the numerous references to Jesus in the Quranic text itself.
If we begin by reviewing the evolution of Western studies on the image of Jesus in the Qur'an, we note the persistence of a strand of analysis which seeks to situate the origins of that image in Christian apocryphal writings or among Christian or JewishChristian sects. In the early part of the twentieth century, this strand of analysis was generally embedded in polemic. Muhammad (very rarely the Qur'an) is said to have had a confused and/ or heretical notion of Christianity.
The Qur’anic stories and sayings of Jesus which “he” narrated were fables and fantasies, or at best apocryphal material which, one is left to presume, circulated more easily in the marginal regions of the Byzantine world. Where these stories could not be securely traced back to an origin, they were sometimes said to be the product of a “fertile oriental imagination.” Some scholars acknowledged that Jesus occupied a special place among the many prophets of the Qur’an. Others denied that Jesus was any more highlighted than, say, Abraham, Moses, Joseph, or David, who are also prominent Qur’anic prophets. On the plane of theology, some writers argue that the Christian concept of redemption is absent from the Jesus of the Qur’an and that therefore a genuine and total reconciliation between Islam and Christianity is at best problematic.‘ Several factors, however, have acted to balance, if not entirely to change, these images and interpretations of the Qur’anic Jesus in Western scholarship. To begin with, the resurgence of scientific interest in folklore studies and a radical reassessment of the place and function of myth in systems of belief have led to a more tolerant, even sympathetic attitude to the “fables” of the Qur’an and of early Islamic literature in general.
In some cases, it is recognized that such fables may in fact possess considerable importance—not so much in themselves but for their role in preserving Jewish or Christian materials that might otherwise have been lost. Second, the discovery and subsequent publication of the Nag Hammadi “library,” a collection of Gnostic and other early scriptures found in Egypt in 1945, has radically altered our understanding of the form and diffusion of early Christian texts and sectarian beliefs. In general, this means that we now know far more about Eastern Christianity, the immediate background of the Qur’anic Jesus, than was known half a century ago. A little before Nag Hammadi, the publication of religious texts of Syriac, Coptic, and Ethiopic Christianity had helped, though less dramatically than Nag Hammadi, to illumine the types of Christianity prevalent in regions in intimate contact with pre-Islamic Arabia.’
Third, and partly as a result of the first two factors, the New Testament Apocrypha have been assembled, translated, and analyzed with more accuracy and sympathy than ever before. Among other conclusions of this recent research is the emerging consensus that the apocryphal writings, considerable in volume, survived in active use among Eastern (and indeed Western) congregations well beyond their formal exclusion from the New Testament canon by the Church Councils of the fourth and fifth centuries.’ For the Qur’anic images of Jesus and of the Christians, the implications are important. If these images were derived in part from the Apocrypha, the Qur’an was at least echoing a living—not an imaginary—Christianity.°
Last, the introduction of various tools of modern literary criticism into the analysis of the Qur’anic text has led to a shift in emphasis away from the delineation of “influence” and toward an attempt to understand the text on its own terms and territory.” The results of this endeavor are not uniformly convincing, but they do at least represent a new departure from the analysis of the Qur’anic images of Jesus in terms of influence or derivation, terms which are now recognized to be far more complex processes than was hitherto assumed.
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