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I have a deal with myself that I’m not gonna work on my article this week. However, there’s no rule against tweeting about it…
Muslims starting writing down exegesis – interpretation of the Qur’an – before 750, but those early writings haven’t survived.
However, we do have a lot of material in later texts that claims to be from this early period: short reports passed down from master to student.
It’s hard to know how much of this material is authentically early. Opinions from the early masters were valuable, so there was a lot of misattribution.
Sometimes the misattribution would have been consciously misleading, but sometimes it happened by accident.
Medieval scholars had an idea of who had taught whom, so they tended to combine various chains and extend them to the most ‘obvious’ authority.
One way or another, opinions from Muslim thinkers in the eighth century got projected back to the first and second generations of Islam.
So for historians today, there’s plenty of reason to think an opinion might be a later forgery, and little evidence to show that it’s genuinely early.
This problem is all the starker when early masters like Ibn Abbas are made to give contradictory opinions: which, if any, did he really believe?
We can make some progress if we have lots of versions of a particular report, on various chains of transmission.
By studying how the variants have drifted apart in wording, we can build a family tree of variants. Good old stemmatic analysis.
And if that family tree matches the chains of transmission attached to those variants, we can identify a ‘common link’ who passed the report on to multiple students.
This might be the silver bullet for early exegesis IF we had lots of variants for every report, each with a meticulous chain of transmission—but we don’t.
There wasn’t a careful discipline for noting and memorising chains of transmission at the start, so the chains for early periods are patchy.
Even when scholars were writing their big compilations of exegesis from around 900, it wasn’t a standard requirement to add chains to every opinion.
Realistically, then, we’re lucky if we have a single chain of transmission for a particular opinion, and we have no compelling reason to trust it.
As a result, we can claim to know a fair bit about how Muslims were interpreting the Qur’an in 800, but far less about 700, let alone 650.
I’ve been looking at the exegeses for Qur’an 2:259. Mostly what I’ve found is material from the mid-eighth century that may or may not have earlier roots.
But here and there I’ve been able to trace opinions to a particular community of scholars in Medina, Basra or Kufa, sometime around 700.
This doen’t prove that the great masters actually said those words! But it does suggest that this interpretation was circulating in that community.
A lot of the earliest-looking reports in exegesis are basically paraphrases: God said X, and by this he meant Y.
There isn’t a huge amount of context. The long, entertaining narratives of people like Muqatil are a mid-eighth-century phenomenon.
When it comes to Q. 2:259, this lack of context is a major issue, because that verse is about an unnamed man who is resurrected at an unnamed place and time.
In the earliest reconstructable opinions, there is a sense that the man was an ancient Israelite/Judaean. (A fair assumption.)
An opinion associated with Medina, around 700, says that the man was Jeremiah. This is interesting, because the biblical Jeremiah was not resurrected.
And over the next 50 years, the opinions move away from simple paraphrasis and toward hard details: e.g. the place was Jerusalem or somewhere in Iraq.
The Qur’anic verse says that the resurrected man had food and drink with him, and the way the exegetes talk about this is powerfully illustrative:
In the earliest reports, they merely say that the food and drink has not gone off, despite sitting out for a hundred years.
By the middle of the eighth century, they’re speculating on what the food and drink actually were: figs, grapes, bread, juice, wine, water, milk…
As I’ve argued before, the more elaborate exegeses of Q. 2:259 are informed by an originally Jewish legend from around the year 100. iandavidmorris.com/wp-content/upl…
But the earliest traceable reports don’t seem to have access to this legend. For the most part, they’re trying to interpret the Qur’an using the Qur’an.
The earliest exegetes are just figuring out if the words “look at your donkey” mean that the donkey was resurrected, or miraculously preserved for 100 years.
The impression I’m getting is that Q. 2:259 was utterly missing its context until the exegetes started sharing a legend that filled in the blanks.
Of course, the evidence is very poor; I’m doing the best I can with the tools at our disposal. But if I’m right, we should consider the following possibility:
The Muslims in Arabia either did not have the Jewish legend or they forgot it. The legend was then absorbed from the conquered peoples of the Near East.
It follows that Q. 2:259 may have had nothing to do with the Jewish legend, originally; this connection was made by scholars working decades after Muhammad.
That is to say, the medieval exegetes were in a similar boat to modern historians: they were using all the resources at their disposal to make sense of a difficult source.
The broader point is that medieval exegesis is no handbook to interpreting the Qur’an: the exegetes didn’t have a solid understanding of their scripture.
That last point is very bold, obviously, and I wouldn’t dare to make on the back of this research alone; but other historians have been making this case for decades now.
That’s all I have to say about this for now. Please be gentle in your feedback. My (eventual) article will have the full details, so please also be patient!
