Headings
Introduction: Repetition “for Ease of Memorization”
This concept that the Quran was possibly and even probably orally composed is probably the most single important concept for unravelling its genesis and its unique genre. Doing this has been made possible through much ground-breaking word in linguistics in the 20th century that was not available before.
The question of the repetitiveness and other unusual features has often been raised, even by Muslims, and the usual answer, again from Muslims is that it is “to make it easy to memorize”. Indeed the Qur’an itself states:
“And We have certainly made the Qur’ān easy for remembrance, so is there any who will remember?” (Q 54:17)
I argue that this is only half of the answer: the Qur’an is repetitive because it was meant to be memorized not only by the people but also by the person composing it.
I make this strong contention based on pioneering work done by Milman Parry and Albert Lord dealing with the Greek Homeric epics, African, Slavic tribes and other fascinating material. The oral performer must keep his reciting in such a format that he may be able to reproduce it at a later performance, build upon it, and also pass it down to his pupils/ children who might continue the performance, since this was their source of livelihood, like theatre actors. In the Hijaz such oral performers were present, they were called qussas (kissa– story in Urdu). As we now know, the culture in the Hijaz was much the same, one of orality and oral poetry telling and performing.
Even a cursory reading of the Quran makes it obvious that the Quran simply is not like a regular book that one picks up at the bookshop: it has no discernible plot and seems to consist of a collection of rather rambling and repetitive edicts rather arbitrarily divided into chapters. This is not just a subjective claim on my part- that the original order of the chapters actually seems to have been lost somewhere along its history is well accepted.
Mohammed never seems to have compiled a written volume in his lifetime, nor expressed a desire to do so. We will make the case here that the Qur’an is primarily what is called an “oral composition”. The reason that the Qur’an is easy to memorize is simply out of the necessity of entailed in that genre.
The Qur’an, was a poem composed by Muhammed over 23 years (obviously this is the critical, not the religious Muslim view). He did so in a manner that he could retain himself, since he was illiterate (most Muslims are extremely sure Muhammed was illiterate, and this would be entirely not uncommon in areas were literacy rates would be only a few percent if that). Thus for this purpose the text had to be repetitive, and it also ended up being unsystematic, since words were not easily erased or even rearranged mentally.
The content itself was based on Muhammed’s understanding and interpretation of Judeo-Christian literature, and adding to it his life experiences. This becomes analogous to the oral composition of famous poems like the Illiad and the Odyssey, as we will see, which would also have claimed some truth and some knowledge of previous legends. Dante’s Divine Comedy is also based upon scripture, and would also have been composed over several years, but Dante was highly literate, and so his poem had incredibly rich complexity and would, in contrast to these others, be extremely difficult to memorize. Many still recognize it as the greatest poem even written.
However this system of “making it easy to memorize” is not a perfect system since it relies on the human intellect and memory. Thus the problems that I have mentioned would have crept in. Try to compose an entire novel in one take, I’ve never heard of such a thing being done even in writing, hence the difficulty. Similarly also the stories of the Illiad and Odyssey evolved and gained accretions and editing. The safeguards around these were of course not rigid, so there was much more of this in their cases.
Milman Parry’s work on Iliad & Odyssey
Oral performance used to be an art form and a form of entertainment at social events where poets would relate the epics to the people gathered in the town square on in the market place. In the Hijaz, these oral performers were called “qussas”. In the modern era, people like Matthew Parry and Albert Lord have pioneered “oral literary theory” primarily in their research on the great classic Homeric epics Odyssey and the Iliad, in an attempt to discover how they were composed. They were able to conduct research on modern oral performers like the guslari of Yugoslavian tribal villages, and were thus able to extrapolate their finding from these into their research into the historical works.
Let us examine some of Walter Ong’s work to try an understand the manner in which an oral composition is composed. Already the reader will begin to appreciate echoes of the Qur’an in it (if they’ve read it):
“Milman Parry’s discovery in his doctoral dissertation (1928) might be put this way: virtually every distinctive feature of Homeric poetry is due to the economy enforced on it by oral methods of composition, it became evident that only a tiny fraction of the words in the Iliad and the Odyssey were not parts of formulas, and to a degree devastatingly predictable formulas. Moreover, the standardized formulas were grouped around equally standardized themes, such as the council, the gathering of the army, the challenge, the despoiling of the vanquished, the hero’s shield, and so on and on (Lord 1960, pp. 68–98) (…) repertoire of similar themes is found in oral narrative and other oral discourse around the world… The entire language of the Homeric poems, with its curious mix of early and late Aeolic and Ionic peculiarities, was best explained not as an overlaying of several texts but as a language generated over the years by epic poets using old set expressions which they preserved and/or reworked largely for metrical purposes. (Ong, 23) Homeric Greeks valued clichés because not only the poets but the entire oral noetic world or thought world relied upon the formulaic constitution of thought. In an oral culture, knowledge, once acquired, had to be constantly repeated or it would be lost: fixed, formulaic thought patterns were essential for wisdom and effective administration (Ong, 24).
How, in fact, could a lengthy, analytic solution ever be assembled in the first place? An interlocutor is virtually essential: it is hard to talk to yourself for hours on end. Sustained thought in an oral culture is tied to communication. But even with a listener to stimulate and ground your thought, the bits and pieces of your thought cannot be preserved in jotted notes. How could you ever call back to mind what you had so laboriously worked out? The only answer is: Think memorable thoughts. In a primary oral culture, to solve effectively the problem of retaining and retrieving carefully articulated thought, you have to do your thinking in mnemonic patterns, shaped for ready oral recurrence. Your thought must come into being in heavily rhythmic, balanced patterns, in repetitions or antitheses, in alliterations and assonances, in epithetic and other formulary expressions, in standard thematic settings (the assembly, the meal, the duel, the hero’s ‘helper’, and so on), in proverbs which are constantly heard by everyone so that they come to mind readily and which themselves are patterned for retention and ready recall, or in other mnemonic form. Serious thought is intertwined with memory systems. Mnemonic needs determine even syntax. (Havelock, Singer of Tales1963, pp. 87–96, 131–2, 294–6). Protracted orally based thought, even when not in formal verse, tends to be highly rhythmic, for rhythm aids recall, even physiologically. (Ong, 34)
In an oral culture, to think through something in nonformulaic, non-patterned, non-mnemonic terms, even if it were possible, would be a waste of time, for such thought, once worked through, could never be recovered with any effectiveness, as it could be with the aid of writing. It would not be abiding knowledge but simply a passing thought, however complex… In an oral culture, experience is intellectualized mnemonically. (35)
Since in a primary oral culture conceptualized knowledge that is not repeated aloud soon vanishes, oral societies must invest great energy in saying over and over again what has been learned arduously over the ages. This need establishes a highly traditionalist or conservative set of mind that with good reason inhibits intellectual experimentation. (Ong 41)
Thought Patterns in Oral Culture
Understanding the limitations of pre-literate society helps us understand why the Qur’an itself to the Western reader seems limited in substance, spirituality and introspection, intuition, contemplation, and reflection. This is indeed reflective of the shallow nature of pre-literate compositions, which we are able to, through the means of good 21st century research, exactly how is was composed in the first place- and I posit much of it was indeed composed on the fly, in the manner that oral performers. Parry, Lord, Havelock and others have studied this very subject matter in modern-day pre-literate tribes in rural Russia and Yugoslavia, that preserve traditions orally. It has been shown by these same researchers that accurate textual preservation is not a primary concern in these cultures, how could it be, for there is not even a concept of text. For someone like Mohammed too, such concerns could not have been uppermost, and for the same reason. There are several narratives which I get into later where indeed Mohamed iterates that variants are acceptable, which would seem to reflect this sentiment “as long as you don’t make a verse of mercy into a verse of punishment” indeed would seem to allow for a wide range within those constraints.
“All thought, including that in primary oral cultures, is to some degree analytic: it breaks its materials into various components. But abstractly sequential, classificatory, explanatory examination of phenomena or of stated truths is impossible without writing and reading. Human beings in primary oral cultures, those untouched by writing in any form, learn a great deal and possess and practice great wisdom, but they do not ‘study’. They learn by apprenticeship—hunting with experienced hunters, for example—by discipleship, which is a kind of apprenticeship, by listening, by repeating what they hear, by mastering proverbs and ways of combining and recombining them, by assimilating other formulary materials, by participation in a kind of corporate retrospection—not by study in the strict sense.” (Ong, 8) “Written words are residue. Oral tradition has no such residue or deposit. When an often-told oral story is not actually being told, all that exists of it is the potential in certain human beings to tell it.” (Ong, 11)
Literate users of a grapholect such as standard English have access to vocabularies hundreds of times larger than any oral language can manage. In such a linguistic world dictionaries are essential. It is demoralizing to remind oneself that there is no dictionary in the mind,…without writing, human consciousness cannot achieve its fuller potentials, cannot produce other beautiful and powerful creations. In this sense, orality needs to produce and is destined to produce writing. Literacy, as will be seen, is absolutely necessary for the development not only of science but also of history, philosophy, explicative understanding of literature and of any art, and indeed for the explanation of language (including oral speech) itself There is hardly an oral culture or a predominantly oral culture left in the world today that is not somehow aware of the vast complex of powers forever inaccessible without literacy. This awareness is agony for persons rooted in primary orality, (Ong, 14)
Ong relates some of the experiments conducted upon such “pre-literates” by the Russian Luria among some Ukranian villagers: “…One series consisted of drawings of the objects hammer, saw, log, hatchet. Illiterate subjects consistently thought of the group not in categorical terms (three tools, the log not a tool) but in terms of practical situations —‘situational thinking’—without adverting at all to the classification ‘tool’ as applying to all but the log. If you are a workman with tools and see a log, you think of applying the tool to it, not of keeping the tool away from what it was made for—in some weird intellectual game. A 25-year-old illiterate peasant: ‘They’re all alike. The saw will saw the log and the hatchet will chop it into small pieces. If one of these has to go, I’d throw out the hatchet. It doesn’t do as good a job as a saw’ they would not fit their thinking into pure logical forms, which they seem to have found uninteresting. Why should they be interesting? Syllogisms relate to thought, but in practical matters no one operates in formally stated syllogisms. In Luria’s field work, requests for definitions of even the most concrete objects met with resistance. ‘Try to explain to me what a tree is.’ ‘Why should I? Everyone knows what a tree is, they don’t need me telling them’, (Ong 49-51)
Luria’s illiterates had difficulty in articulate self-analysis. Self- analysis requires a certain demolition of situational thinking. It calls for isolation of the self, around which the entire lived world swirls for each individual person, removal of the center of every situation from that situation enough to allow the center, the self, to be examined and described. Luria put his questions only after protracted conversation about people’s characteristics and their individual differences (1976, p. 148). A 38-year-old man, illiterate, rom a mountain pasture camp was asked (1976, p. 150), ‘What sort of person are you, what’s your character like, what are your good qualities and shortcomings? How would you describe yourself?’ ‘I came here from Uch-Kurgan, I was very poor, and now I’m married and have children.’ ‘Are you satisfied with yourself or would you like to be different?’ ‘It would be good if I had a little more land and could sow some wheat.’ Externals command attention. ‘And what are your shortcomings?’ ‘This year I sowed one pood of wheat, and we’re gradually fixing the shortcomings.’ More external situations. ‘Well, people are different —calm, hot-tempered, or sometimes their memory is poor. What do you think of yourself?’ ‘We behave well—if we were bad people, no one would respect us’ (Ong54)
Genealogies- Purpose and Nature
Another feature of oral cultures was the preservation of oral genealogies. We see this phenomenon in the Bible, where the seeming inaccuracies in the genealogies of Jesus in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke and also the fact that in Matthew these genealogies span right through the generations of Abraham Noah right up to Adam! We can see from the work summarised below that these were indeed features of pre-literate societies, and the purpose and nature of keeping these genealogies becomes more evident by studying these cultures. Further the Arabisn tribes among which Mohaed was born seemingly had the same traditions, and a form of genealogy has also been attempted to be traced from one such tradition.
“Goody and Watt (1968, pp. 31–3) cite Laura Bohannan, Emrys Peters, and Godfrey and Monica Wilson for striking instances of the homeostasis of oral cultures in the handing on of genealogies. Some decades ago among the Tiv people of Nigeria the genealogies actually used orally in settling court disputes have been found to diverge considerably from the genealogies carefully recorded in writing by the British forty years earlier (because of their importance then, too, in court disputes). The later Tiv have maintained that they were using the same genealogies as forty years earlier and that the earlier written record was wrong. What had happened was that the later genealogies had been adjusted to the changed social relations among the Tiv: they were the same in that they functioned in the same way to regulate the real world. The integrity of the past was subordinate to the integrity of the present. Goody and Watt (1968, p. 33) report an even more strikingly detailed case of ‘structural amnesia’ among the Gonja in Ghana. Written records made by the British at the turn of the twentieth century show that Gonja oral tradition then presented Ndewura Jakpa, the founder of the state of Gonja, as having had seven sons, each of whom was ruler of one of the seven territorial divisions of the state. By the time sixty years later when the myths of state were again recorded, two of the seven divisions had disappeared, one by assimilation to another division and the other by reason of a boundary shift. In these later myths, Ndewura Jakpa had five sons, and no mention was made of the two extinct divisions. The Gonja were still in contact with their past, tenacious about this contact in their myths, but the part of the past with no immediately discernible relevance to the present had simply fallen away. The present imposed its own economy on past remembrances.
Packard (1980, p. 157) has noted that Claude Lévi-Strauss, T.O.Beidelman, Edmund Leach and others have suggested that oral traditions reflect a society’s present cultural values rather than idle curiosity about the past. He finds this is true of the Bashu, as Harms (1980, p. 178) finds it also true of the Bobangi. The implications here for oral genealogies need to be noted. A West African griot or other oral genealogist will recite those genealogies which his hearers listen to. If he knows genealogies which are no longer called for, they drop from his repertoire and eventually disappear. The genealogies of political inners are of course more likely to survive than those of losers. Henige (1980, p.255), reporting on Ganda and Myoro kinglists, notes that the ‘oral mode…allows for inconvenient parts of the past to be forgotten’ because of ‘the exigencies of the continuing present’. Moreover, skilled oral narrators deliberately vary their traditional narratives because part of their skill is their ability to adjust to new audiences and new situations or simply to be coquettish.(…) Oral cultures encourage triumphalism…”(Ong 48,49)
Reconstructive Memory- Bartlett, others
In the 20 century there has also been fascinating research done into the subject of human memory per se. Frederic Bartlett originally tested his idea of the reconstructive nature of recall by presenting a group of participants with foreign folk tales (his most famous being “War of the Ghosts”) with which they had no previous experience. After presenting the story, he tested their ability to recall and summarize the stories at various points after the presentation to newer generations of participants. His findings showed that the participants could provide a simple summary but had difficulty recalling the story accurately, with the participants’ own account generally being shorter and manipulated in such a way that aspects of the original story that were unfamiliar or conflicting to the participants’ own schematic knowledge were removed or altered in a way to fit into more personally relevant versions. For instance, allusions made to magic and Native American mysticism that were in the original version were omitted as they failed to fit into the average Westerner schematic network. Besides, after several recounts of the story had been made by successive generations of participants, certain aspects of the recalled tale were embellished so they were more consistent with the participants’ cultural and historical viewpoint compared to the original text (e.g. Emphasis placed on one of the characters desire to return to care for his dependent elderly mother). These findings lead Bartlett to conclude that recall is predominately a reconstructive rather than reproductive process. James J. Gibson built off of the work that Bartlett originally laid down, suggesting that the degree of change found in a reproduction of an episodic memory depends on how that memory is later perceived. This concept was later tested by Carmichael, Hogan, and Walter (1932) who exposed a group of participants to a series of simple figures and provided different words to describe each image. For example, all participants were exposed to an image of two circles attached by a single line, where some of the participants were told it was a barbell and the rest were told it was a pair of reading glasses. The experiment revealed that when the participants were later tasked with replicating the images, they tended to add features to their own reproduction that more closely resembled the word they were primed with.
Accuracy of Oral Tradition
In the past, literates have commonly assumed that oral memorization in an oral culture, normally achieved the same goal of absolutely verbatim repetition. How such repetition could be verified before sound recordings were known was unclear, since in the absence of writing the only way to test for verbatim repetition of lengthy passages would be the simultaneous recitation of the passages by two or more persons together. Successive recitations could not be checked against each other. But instances of simultaneous recitation in oral cultures were hardly sought for. (Ong56)
Most of these living South Slavic narrative poets—and indeed all of the better ones—are illiterate. Learning to read and write disables the oral poet, Lord found: it introduces into his mind the
concept of a text as controlling the narrative and thereby interferes with the oral composing processes, which have nothing to do with texts but are ‘the remembrance of songs sung’ (Ong 58,59)
One of the most telling discoveries in Lord’s work has been that, although singers are aware that two different singers never sing the same song exactly alike, nevertheless a singer will protest that he
can do his own version of a song line for line and word for word any time, and indeed, ‘just the same twenty years from now’ (Lord1960, p. 27). When, however, their purported verbatim renditions are recorded and compared, they turn out to be never the same, though the songs are recognizable versions of the same story. ‘Word for word and line for line’, as Lord interprets (1960, p. 28), is simply an emphatic way of saying ‘like’. ‘Line’ is obviously a text-based concept, and even the concept of a ‘word’ as a discrete entity apart from a flow of speech seems somewhat text-based… (Ong 59) What was retained? The first recitation of a poem by its originator? How could the originator ever repeat it word for word the second time and be sure he had done so? (Ong 60)
Drawing Comparisons with the Qur’an
Oral Formulaic density in the Quran – Andy Bannister
In the case of Homer, formulas lie everywhere, with a formulaic density in places of 90%, a figure Lord described as ‘amazing’ considering we have only 27,000 lines of Homeric Greek to make comparisons with. Given that the Iliad and Odyssey also pass two other “tests” of orality (enjambement and thematic structure), there can be little doubt that Homer was an oral poet. …Magoun…conducted a formulaic analysis of the first twenty-five lines of Beowulf and found that 70% was repeated elsewhere in the corpus of Old English poetry, enabling him to conclude that Beowulf had been composed orally, just as Parry had found for Homer and the Yugoslavian guslari. Several Other developments continued to take place. Eric Havelock’s influential Preface to Plato helped further shape how people viewed Homer and Greek poetry, effectively asking the question what the poetry was for. He concluded that the poems were the encyclopaedias of their day, the tradition acting as “a collective social memory”; oral poetry was the way that traditional ideas and teaching were preserved and transmitted…
Roland turned out to have a formulaic density of 35.2%. Based on this analysis, Duggan suggested that 20% represented a threshold beyond which one could be increasingly confident that a particular text was composed in oral-formulaic mode
The computer-generated results are significant, suggesting that the figure for the Qur’an’s overall formularity lies somewhere between 23.55% (if one uses a five-base sequence analysis) and 52.18% (a three-base sequence analysis); if one uses an analysis based on roots rather than bases, then these figures climb higher still. Whether one defines the criteria for what constitutes a ‘formula’ loosely or more rigidly, the computer consistently reveals such a high formulaic content, that one is confidently able. to concur with Dundes that the Qu’an is ‘extraordinarily high’ in formulaic content. Furthermore, some sequences of bases are shown to be staples of qur’anic diction, occurring dozens of times. In short, formulaic diction seems to be extremely deeply woven into the fabric of the Qur’an,
in just the same way as, for example, Parry and Lord were able to show for the formulaic diction of Homer throughout the Iliad and the Odyssey
(155, Andy Bannister, Oral Formulaic Study of the Quran)
Literacy and use of written Script in the Hijaz
So it is useful to understand precisely the milieu into which the Quranic verses are received. This society is not just “poorly literate”, as some imagine (as a comparison, literacy in Palestine in at the time of Christ was thought to be only 3%,) rather in the case of the Hijaz, and for most Hijazis there is likely no concept of a book at all! All that there is, is the possibility of a rudimentary script, although there seem to be no written literature, that script is probably only used for the purposes of some rudimentary contracts between individuals, transactions etc. So also is the poetry of the region oral, although some of it does get written is in the neighbouring Syriac dialect, a derivative of Aramaic that Christians of the surrounding regions are using, which is why we can examine some of it today.
The Qur’an itself is first book to ever be written down in that culture, only arriving 23 years later, even 2 years after the death of Mohamed. So the first myth that we must dispel is that the Qur’an is not a “received document”, as is popularly conceived, and in the manner of the Books of the Jews like the Torah, rather it is an oral tradition for which a documentation is eventually accomplished. Even in 16:89 where it is mentioned “we have given to you this book (l-kitaba)…”, it is not necessary a physical book that is alluded to, “kitaba” can simply allude to an oral composition and the manner in which oral composers would refer to their compositions. We will at a later stage look more into recent research into cultures which have similar oral traditions and how their manner of preservation can be seen to be similar to the Qur’an. Again the Qur’an itself means “recite!”, not “write”.
Muslim response:
Dr. Mustafa al-A’zami compiled a list of approximately 65 companions in his book “Kuttaab un-Nabi (literally: “Scribes of the Prophet”), who used to write down the Revelation dictated by the Prophet, at one time or the other. They are: Abu Ayyub al-Ansari, Aban ibn Sa’eed, Abu Umama, Abu Bakr al-Siddiq, Abu Sufyan, Abu Hudhaifa, Abu Salama, Abu-‘Abas, Ubayy ibn Ka’b, al-Arqam, Usaid ibn Hudair, Aws, Buraida, Basheer, Thabit ibn Qais, Ja’far ibn Abi Talib, Jahm ibn Sa’d, Juhaim, Haatib, Hudhaifa, Husain, Hanzala, Huwaitib, Khalid ibn Saeed, Khalid ibn al-Waleed, Zubair ibn al-‘Awwam, Zubair ibn Arqam, Zaid ibn Thabit, Sa’d ibn ar-Rabee, Sa’d ibn ‘Ubaada, Saeed ibn Saeed, Shurahbeel ibn Hasna, Talha, ‘Amir ibn Fuhaira, ‘Abbas, Abdullah ibn al-Arqam, Abdullah ibn Abi Bakr, Abdullah ibn Rawaha, Abdullah ibn Zaid, Abdullah ibn Sa’d, Abdullah ibn Abdullah, Abdullah ibn ‘Amr, Uthman ib ‘Affan, ‘Uqba, al-‘Alaa al-Hadrami, al-‘Alaa ibn ‘Uqba, ‘Ali ibn Abi-Talib, ‘Umar ibn al-Khattab, ‘Amr ibn al-‘Aas, Muhammad ibn Maslama, Mu’adh ibn Jabal, Mu’awiya ibn Abi-Sufyan, Ma’n ibn-‘Adi, Mu’aiqib, Mugheera, Mundhir, Muhaajir and Yazid ibn Abi-Sufyan.
The evidence of proof-reading is also available. Zayd ibn Thaabit would read out to the Prophet whatever he has written to avoid scribal errors. (As-Suuli, Aadaab al Kuttaab, pg 165; Majma’ az-Zawaid, i: 152)
-The pre-Islamic Hijazi poets like Imri’ ul-Qays, Tarafah ibn al-‘Abd, Zuhair ibn Abi Salamah, ‘Antarah ibn Shaddad, ‘Amr ibn Kalthoum, and many others, used to write long poetries on animal leather and hang it on the Holy Ka’ba! It has been mentioned by Ibn al-Kalbi (d. 204 AH), followed by Ibn ‘Abdi-Rabbihi (d. 328 AH), Ibn Rasheeq al-Qayrawani (d. 463 AH) and also by the famous historian Ibn Khaldoun (d. 808 AH).
-The proof of writing treaties is also available from the ‘incident of Hudaybia’. The Prophet along with 1400 of his companions in the year 629 AD came to Mecca for pilgrimage, but instead of the pilgrimage they had to make a treaty with the Meccans. The fourth rightly guided caliph ‘Ali ibn Abi Taalib wrote the treaty and was duly signed.
-Moreover, Radiocarbon dating has dated the San’aa manuscript (DAM 01-27.1) of the Qur’an (one of the oldest manuscripts of the Qur’an) as a manuscript written between 578AD (44 BH) and 669 AD (49 AH) with a 95% accuracy. (Sadeghi and Berghmann 2010, p 348, Brill publishers). Also, the Birmingham Qur’an manuscript (known as the oldest Qur’anic manuscript known) has been Radiocarbon dated and estimated to be written between 568 AD (56 BH) and 645 AD (25 AH) with a probability of more than 95%! – Not to forget the overwhelming number of inscriptions found all over Hejaz on rocks. One can find verses of the Qur’an, poetries, and small personal informations of the inscripting scribe himself (like his name + the year of the inscription + a prayer to Allah for himself and some others) (check out a few posts of the following page on Twitter with the user handle @mohammed93athar
My Rebuttal:
to the best of my knowledge, the poetry alluded to, and as I have already indicated was not in Arabic at all, what we have of manuscripts is in the Syriac script instead. A treaty is different than a word of literature, because the manner which it is written will be determined by the limitations of the script. So a cave-man might merely make a few marks on a stone as a sign of a pact, the meaning would be implied. I cannot find any manuscript evidence for this. Same goes for the rock inscriptions, they would have been written in the consonantal script. Whatever is the case, I do not believe that my contention “there were no works of literature/poetry in the Arabic script prior to the Qur’an” has been overturned. The fact that there are early Quran’s only support my argument, that the Qurans indeed were only written documents. Finally the narratives for the documentation are not from sahih Hadith. The accreditation of the Hadith is of the highest order in Islam and should easily override any counter narratives. That hadithic narrative tells us that the Quran was not documented in anything approaching complete form, nor memorised, since the prophet himself would have found it difficult to compile a document called a “Quran”, there was nothing to memorise it until someone did compile it.
The Quran essentially is “revealed” by Mohammed, in a series of verses that are interspersed with biblically themed stories. These stories are versions of whatever oral traditions of Jewish and Christians and Arabs that are floating around in the Arabic milieu, in the village square, at the market place, at the trading centres and so on. The article on specific Jewish and para-Christian sources for the Quran are dealt with in a separate article. But this sort of retelling of stories would have been normal in such an oral cultural milieu into which the Quran was born. In the Hijaz, these oral performers were called “qussas”.
Summary of Qur’an’s Compositional Stage
Mohammed never shows an intention of documenting his mysterious revelations, which are unwitnessed, unoriginal and familiar material (Quranic source material is discussed in a separate essay), amenable to changed which get rationalised as “abrogations”, and finally, unfinished: there is no verse that says “now the Revelation is ended”. A con does not know when the game will be up, he extends the con to the time of his death at which point he does not care. All the confusion that is present in the the Quranic narrative and the complex mysteries of qir’at and ahruf can be understood rather simply if this difficult truth is accepted. It is uncertain even what was being said by Mohammed, he seemed unsure as to what he himself had previously recited. In all this he was likely playing the role of a “qussa”, a village reciter/poet who retold popular legends with modifications around the themes to political agendas which in his case were quasi-religious.
Bibliography
- Lord, Albert, The Singer of Tales (Harvard Studies in Comparative Literature)
- Orality and Literacy, Walter J. Ong
- Havelock, Eric, A Preface toPlato
- Bart Ehrman says in interview that he took two years off everything to dedicate himself solely to studying oral transmission. His arguments are primarily against Christianity, however the principles are the same: Ehrman, Bart Jesus Before the Gospels ,How the Earliest Christians Remembered
- An Oral-Formulaic Study of the Qur’an