On the Qur'anic accusation of scriptural falsification (tahrif) and Christian anti-Jewish polemic.

• Author: Reynolds, Gabriel Said
• Position: Report

According to the fully articulated salvation history of Islam, Moses and Jesus (like all prophets) were Muslims. Moses received an Islamic scripture, the Torah (tawrat), as did Jesus, the Gospel (injil). Their communities, however, suppressed their religion and altered their scriptures. Accordingly, a canonical hadith has the Prophet Muhammad declare:

O community of Muslims, how is it that you seek wisdom from the People of the Book? Your book, brought down upon His Prophet--blessings and peace of God upon him--is the latest report about God. You read a Book that has not been distorted, but the People of the Book, as God related to you, exchanged that which God wrote [for something else], changing the book with their hands. (1) This hadith reflects the idea found frequently among Muslim scholars, usually described with the term tahrif that the Bible has been literally altered. The same idea lies behind Yaqut's (d. 626/1229) attribution of a quotation on Jerusalem to a Jewish convert to Islam from Banu Qurayza "who possessed a copy of the uncorrupted Torah." (2)

Muslim scholars also accuse Jews and Christians of misinterpreting the Bible by hiding, ignoring, or misreading it, and on occasion they describe such misinterpretation as tahrif an well. Accordingly, in scholarly treatments of the subject a comparison is sometimes made between tahrif al-nass, alteration of the text of scripture, and tahrif al-ma'ani, misinterpretation of scripture. Yet Muslim scholars who accuse Jews and Christians of misinterpretation do not mean to imply thereby that the Bible has not been altered. Instead they employ the idea of tahrif al-ma'ani for the sake of argument. (3) In al-Radd al-jamil li-ilahiyyat 'Isa bi-sarih al-injil ("The Splendid Refutation to the Divinity of Jesus through a Clear Reading of the Gospel"), a work attributed to al-Ghazali (d. 505/1111), the author quotes liberally from the Christian Gospels to argue against Christian doctrine on Jesus. (4) However, if the author finds his religious thought confirmed in the Bible, he never turns to the Bible as a source for new or improved religious thought. He does not, for example, accept the New Testament accounts of the crucifixion.

In the present paper I will say something about the question of tahrif, in a way that involves speaking of the topic generally at times and, at other times, contrasting the Qur'anic treatment of this topic with that of medieval Islamic literature. In order to make my argument as clear as possible, it will be necessary first to define the terminology I will use in articulating it. As I see it, four different layers of meaning can be associated with the Arabic word tahrif. Accordingly, I use a different English phrase or term for each layer. First, I use the phrase "scriptural falsification"' (as in the title of this paper) as an overarching topical description for everything that the Arabic term tahrif might entail. Second. I use the phrase "textual alteration" to describe the common accusation of medieval (and modern) Islamic literature that the Jews and Christians really erased (or destroyed) some or all of the true scripture and rewrote it (tahrif al-nass). Third, I use the term "misinterpretation" for the accusation that the Jews and Christians do not properly understand their own scripture (tahrif al-ma'ani). Fourth, I use the phrase "they shift words out of their contexts" to translate as literally as possible the Qur'anic phrase (related to tahrif) yuharrifuna l-kalima 'an mawadi'ihi, for reasons that I will explain below.

This translation itself anticipates my argument that the Qur'an has a quite limited sense of what the act of scriptural falsification involves. But I will also make a second argument in this paper, one about those whom the Qur'an accuses of scriptural falsification. On this point as well there is a distinct contrast between the evidence of the Qur'an itself and the position of later Islamic literature. Most medieval Islamic texts that address scriptural falsification are concerned with Christians. This is the case with the aforementioned al-Radd al-jamil, as well as with 'Abd al-Jabbar's (d. 415/1025) Critique of Christian Origins (a treatise in his Tathbil dala'il al-nubuwwa), Abu 1-Baqa' Salih b. Husayn al-Ja'fari's (d. 618/1221) Takhjil man harrafa al-injil ("The Humiliation of Those Who Falsified the Gospel"), and Ibn Taymiyya's (d. 728/1328) at-Jawab al-sahih li-man baddala din al-masih. To my knowledge no such class of works exists on the Jewish falsification of scripture.

For the most part these medieval works on Christian scriptural falsification are shaped by examinations of the New Testament, a technique that would be used to famous effect much later by Rahmatallah Kairanawi (d. 1891) in his debate in Agra, India against the German missionary Karl Gottlieb Pfander (d. 1865). 'Abd al-Jabbar, however, adds to his examination of the New Testament a history of its falsification. (5) This history begins with a dispute between the Jews and the faithful followers of the Muslim Prophet Jesus:

Now, after Christ, his followers conducted their prayers and holidays with the Jews and the Israelites in one place, in their synagogues, despite the conflict between them over Christ. The Romans were ruling over them and the Christians would complain about the Jews to the Roman rulers, showing them how weak they were and asking for compassion. [The Romans] would have compassion on them. This became more frequent until the Romans said to them, "There is an agreement between us and the Jews, that we will not change their religious practices. If you were to deviate from their religious practices and separate yourselves from them ... then we would aid you and make you mightier. Then the Jews would have no way over you. You would be mightier than them." They said, "We will do it." ... But [their companions] replied to them, "You have done wretchedly! It is not permitted for us to place the Injil in the hands of the unclean Romans. ..." A severe conflict ensued between them. [The first group] returned to the Romans and said to them, "Assist us against these companions of ours before assisting us against the Jews! Get our book from them for us." [The companions] concealed themselves from the Romans and fled throughout the land. Those who had made a deal with the Romans gathered and consulted each other over what to adopt in place of the Injil, since it had passed out of their hands. They came to the opinion that they would produce a Gospel (injil), saying, "The Tawrat is only genealogies of the prophets and histories of their lives. We will construct a Gospel accordingly." (6) In 'Abd al-Jabbar's view a faithful group of Jesus's disciples ran away with the true Gospel. Thereafter, the unfaithful disciples who had made a deal with the pagan Romans wrote a false Gospel on the model of the Tawrat. 'Abd al-Jabbar, it might be noted, tells no such story to explain the falsification of the Tawrat. Presumably his silence on this count reflects the relative importance of Christians in 'Abd al-Jabbar's historical context, both in his own city (Rayy, Iran) and in the Islamic world as a whole. Christians, of course, were more numerous than Jews in most of the Islamic world, and Christian forces from Byzantium or Europe formed a constant threat in the medieval period. Accordingly, it is not surprising to find that medieval Muslim scholars generally, and not only 'Abd al-Jabbar, wrote more on the scriptural falsification of the Christians than on that of the Jews. (7)

The scriptural falsification of the Jews is, however, a prominent theme in traditions on the life of the Prophet. (8) One such tradition has some Jews of Medina bring to Muhammad a man and a woman from their community accused of adultery. When Muhammad asks them what penalty the Torah prescribes for this case, they reply that the offenders are to be flogged. At this a companion of Muhammad, 'Abd Allah b. Sail am (himself a recent convert from Judaism), counters that the Torah itself contains a verse condemning adulterers to death by stoning. When they bring out the Torah scrolls to solve the matter, a rabbi places his hand over a passage in the text, reciting only what precedes and what follows it. Ibn Sallam strikes away the rabbi's hand, uncovering the verse with the stoning penalty, and declares, "This, O Messenger of God, is the verse of stoning that he refuses to read to you." Muhammad is appalled, and cries out, "Woe to you Jews! What has induced you to abandon the judgment of God which you hold in your hands?" (9)

Unlike the class of texts on the Christian falsification of scripture, which typically involve either an examination of the New Testament or (in 'Abd al-Jabbar's case) a historical description of how Christians falsified scripture, such traditions often appear to be midrashic. The Ibn Sallam story above seems to be away of explaining surat al-ma' ida (5):41-43, a passage that builds up to the rhetorical question "Why would they ask you to be a judge when they have the judgment of God in the Torah?" The detail of a Jew physically covering a portion of the Torah, meanwhile, is evidently related to the Qur'an's command "Do not cover up the truth with falsehood and conceal the truth" (Q 2:42). A different story has a Jew literally hide a portion of the Torah behind his back, thus explaining surat al 'Imran (3): 187: "When God made a covenant with those who had been given revelation, [He commanded them,] 'Present it to the people. Do not hide it from them.' Yet they cast it behind their backs, bartering it for a cheap thing. They have only bartered for evil." (10)

Such traditions reflect a mechanism of Islamic exegesis referred to in Arabic as ta'yin al-mubham ("resolution of ambiguity"), whereby Qur'anic phrases and allusions are substantiated in historical reports involving (usually) the Prophet and his Companions. In such cases the text itself...