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Paradosis and monotheism: a late antique approach to the meaning of islām in the Quran

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 December 2019

Juan Cole Open the ORCID record for Juan Cole [Opens in a new window]
Juan Cole*
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Abstract

Both the Muslim exegetical tradition and most Western scholarship have posited that the term islām in the Quran means “submission”, i.e. to God, and that it refers to the religion brought by the prophet Muhammad. This paper argues that neither of these assertions is correct. Rather, the abstract noun islām as used in the Quran means “tradition”. It is underlain by the Aramaic mashlmānūtā, which in turn was the term generally used to translate the Greek paradosis. That the Greek usage had a direct impact on Arabic is also considered. The wide range of meanings given paradosis by Greek and Syriac authors is surveyed. A close reading of Quran verses in which the word islām appears shows that it refers to the prophetic tradition of monotheism rather than the surrender of an individual to God. It is synonymous with the Logos of Abraham, in which all the monotheistic religions participate.

Keywords

IslamQuranMuhammadPhilosophyLate antiquity
Type
Article
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Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies , Volume 82 , Issue 3 , October 2019 , pp. 405 - 425
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Copyright © SOAS University of London 2019

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Footnotes

1

My thanks to Sean W. Anthony and the two anonymous referees for the Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies (BSOAS) for their valuable comments on an earlier draft of this article. They are not, of course, responsible for my arguments or any remaining errors.

References

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4 I am anglicizing islām here as a non-count abstract noun, like beauty, rather than using the Arabic definite article al-. Since English non-count abstract nouns do not take a determiner such as the definite article (“Beauty is a classical virtue”) except when qualified by a following clause or prepositional phrase (“the beauty of the statue”), I will treat islām as zero article when it is unqualified. It is, however, meant to be definite.

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27 Bukharin, Mikhail, “Mecca on the caravan routes in Pre-Islamic antiquity”, in Neuwirth, Angelika, Sinai, Nicolai and Marx, Michael (eds), The Qurʾan in Context: Historical and Literary Investigations into the Qurʾanic Milieu (Leiden: Brill, 2010), 115–34Google Scholar; Al-Azmeh, Aziz, The Emergence of Islam in Late Antiquity: Allah and His People (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 134–62Google Scholar; Rubin, Uri, “The Ilaf of Quraysh: a study of sura CVI”, Arabica, 31/2, 1984, 165–88Google Scholar; Heck, Gene W., “‘Arabia without spices’: an alternate hypothesis”, Journal of the American Oriental Society 123/3, 2003, 547–76CrossRefGoogle Scholar; some of these authors are replying to the late Patricia Crone's idiosyncratic scepticism in her youth about the Meccan caravans, which she revised in Crone, Patricia, “Quraysh and the Roman army: making sense of the Meccan leather trade”, BSOAS 70/1, 2017, 63–88CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For non-Muslim witnesses to Muhammad himself as a peripatetic merchant who regularly travelled to Syria, see Jacob of Edessa in Hoyland, Robert, Seeing Islam as Others Saw It (Princeton, NJ: The Darwin Press, Inc., 1997), 165Google Scholar; Hoyland, Robert G., “The earliest Christian writings on Muhammad: an appraisal”, in Motzki, Harald (ed.), The Biography of Muhammad: The Issue of the Sources (Leiden: Brill, 2000), 276–7Google Scholar and Chabot, J.B. (ed. and trans.), Le chronique de Michel le Syrien, Patriarche Jacobite Syrien (1166–1199), 4 vols (Paris: Ernest Leroux, 1899–1905), 2: 403–4Google Scholar.

28 For a similar argument made from rural inscriptions see Hoyland, Robert, “Epigraphy and the linguistic background of the Qur'an”, in Reynolds, Gabriel Said (ed.), The Qur'an in Its Historical Context (New York: Routledge, 2008), 51–69Google Scholar; for urban Arab Christianity in late antiquity, see Shahid, Byzantium and the Arabs in the Sixth Century, vol. 1, pt. 2, and vol. 2, pt. 2, 277–96.

29 Ferguson, Everett, “Paradosis and traditio: a word study”, in Rombs, Ronnie J. and Hwang, Alexander Y. (eds), Tradition and the Rule of Faith in the Early Church: Essays in Honor of Joseph T. Lienhard, S.J. (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 2010), 3–29Google Scholar, this point on 4.

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31 William Wayte Smith and George Eden Marindin, A Dictionary of Greek and Roman Antiquities, 2 vols (London: J. Murray, 3rd rev. edn. 1901), 1: 720; Augustine S. Carman, “The New Testament usage of the Greek mysteries”, The Bibliotheca Sacra 50/200, 1893, 613–39, this point on 621; in general, see Bremmer, Jan, “Initiation into the Eleusinian mysteries: a ‘thin’ description”, in Bull, Christian H., Lied, Liv and Turner, John D. (eds), Nag Hammadi and Manichaean Studies (Leiden: Brill, 2011), 375–97Google Scholar and Cosmopoulos, Michael B., Bronze Age Eleusis and the Origins of the Eleusinian Mysteries (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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35 Proclus, The Commentaries of Proclus on the Timaeus of Plato, trans. Thomas Taylor, 5 vols (London: the Author, 1820), 1: 324; Uždavinys, Algis, Philosophy as a Rite of Rebirth: From Ancient Egypt to Neoplatonism (London: The Prometheus Trust, 2008), 47Google Scholar.

36 Baumgarten, A.I., “The Pharisaic paradosis”, The Harvard Theological Review 80/1, 1987, 63–77CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

37 In the Peshitta, paradōke is translated by the Syriac shlm in this verse, which I am arguing would have been aslama in the oral Syrian Arabic translation. The noun form paradosis is most often, however, rendered in the Peshitta as puqdānā, i.e. teaching or commandment. This tendency may be another argument for the direct relationship of the Quranic Arabic to the Greek.

38 For accounts of pagan monotheism in the Quran see Crone, Patricia, “The religion of the qur'anic pagans: God and the lesser deities”, Arabica, 57/2–3, 2010, 151–200CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

39 Wansbrough, John, Quranic Studies: Sources and Methods of Scriptural Interpretation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 8–12Google Scholar; for covenants and their invocation in the Quran see Gwynne, Rosalind Ward, Logic, Rhetoric and Legal Reasoning in the Qur'an: God's Arguments (London: Taylor and Francis, 2004)Google Scholar, especially ch. 1, but also passim.

40 Hick, John, A Christian Theology of Religion: The Rainbow of Faiths (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1995)Google Scholar and Race, Alan, Thinking about Religious Pluralism: Shaping Theology of Religion for Our Times (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2015)Google Scholar.

41 Glei, Reinhold and Reichmuth, Stefan, “Religion between the last judgment, law and faith: Koranic Din and its rendering in Latin translations of the Qur'an”, Religion 42/2, 2012, 247–71CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and (more sceptical) Donner, “Dīn, Islām, und Muslim im Koran”; Jeffery, The Foreign Vocabulary of the Qur'an, 131–2; Wilfred Cantwell Smith, The Meaning and End of Religion (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1991 [1962]), ch. 4; and Mansour Shaki, “Dēn”, Encyclopaedia Iranica Online <http://www.iranicaonline.org/articles/den>. The Persian term was also adopted into Syriac and used by eastern Christians: see Adam H. Becker, “Martyrdom, religious difference, and ‘fear’ as a category of piety in the Sasanian Empire: the case of the martyrdom of Gregory and the martyrdom of Yazdpaneh”, Journal of Late Antiquity, 2/2, 2009, 300–36.

42 The universalism of the concept was accepted by some medieval Muslim authorities. For instance, Jalāl al-Dīn Muḥammad al-Maḥallī and Jalāl al-Dīn al-Suyūṭī, Al-Qur’ān al-Karīm: bi-al-rasm al-ʿUthmānī. Wa-bihāmishi Tafsīr al-Imāmayn al-Jalīlayn (Beirut: Dār al-Maʿrifah, c. 1990), 44, say apud 3: 19, that islām means here the divinely ordained legislation (al-sharʿ) sent via the Messengers – in the plural (al-mabʿūth bihi al-rusul) – based on monotheism (al-mabnī ʿalā al-tawḥīd).

43 ʿImād al-Dīn Ismaʿīl Ibn Kathīr, Tafsīr al-Qur’ān al-ʿAẓīm (Beirut: Dār Ibn Ḥazm, 2000), 358, begins by defining islām as following all the prophets sent by God, which again underlines that medieval Muslim authorities recognized that it denoted a prophetic tradition. He then continues, however, “… until they were sealed by Muhammad, who barred all roads to him except that of Muhammad, such that anyone who encounters God after he sent Muhammad, practicing a religion other than his path – it is not acceptable”. While Ibn Kathīr was correct that the concept of islām has a serial dimension, since it means “tradition” and Muhammad extended the tradition, I cannot see this notion of “outside of Muḥammad there is no salvation” anywhere in the Quran itself, and it is contradicted by passages such as The Cow 2: 62.

44 François de Blois, “Naṣrānī (Ναζωραȋος) and ḥanīf (ἐθνικός): studies on the religious vocabulary of Christianity and of Islam”, BSOAS 65/1, 2002, 1–30.

45 Donner, “Dīn, Islām, und Muslim im Koran” see also Donner, Fred M., Muhammad and the Believers: At the Origins of Islam (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2010), 70Google Scholar.

46 Ṭabarī, Tafsī r al-Ṭabarī, 8: 85.

47 In Palmyra they had been called ginnaye in Aramaic: Javier Teixidor, The Pantheon of Palmyra (Leiden: Brill, 1979), 77–9.

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51 Josephus, Flavius, Works, trans. Whiston, William, 2 vols (Philadelphia: Grigg & Elliot, 1844), 1: 30Google Scholar. For Genesis's incorporation of Ishmael and his descendants into the promise to Abraham, see Blenkinsopp, Joseph, “Abraham as paradigm in the priestly history in Genesis”, Journal of Biblical Literature 128/2, 2009, 225–41CrossRefGoogle Scholar, this point on 236–8.

52 Ferguson, “Paradosis and traditio”, 11–12.

53 Bultmann, Rudolf, Theology of the New Testament, trans. Grobel, Kendrick, 2 vols (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 1951), 1: 121–2Google Scholar.

54 See de Blois, “Naṣrānī (Ναζωραȋος) and ḥanīf (ἐθνικός)”.