'Blessed are the cheese makers' Reflections on the Transmission of Knowledge in Islam.

• Author: Carter, Michael G.

Following a precedent set last year, when the title of the Presidential Address included a quotation from Monty Python, I have done the same, well aware of the risk that it might become a tradition, and thus a burden on all future speakers. Already by equating "tradition" with "burden" I may have revealed my hand.

"Blessed are the cheese makers," as you probably know, occurs in The Life of Brian in answer to a question from a spectator at the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5:9) who is too far away to hear what Jesus is saying. In this Address I shall couple the mishearing of the words of Jesus with a misprinting of them: in the second edition of the Geneva Bible, 1562, for this Beatitude we read "Blessed are the placemakers." The Arabists among us will immediately recognise what is at issue here, namely the two kinds of error, oral and textual, which arise in the transmission of knowledge, and I am sure that similar corruptions occur in the many other cultures with which the American Oriental Society concerns itself.

Of course we have no reason to doubt that the words in St. Matthew's Gospel were correctly translated from Aramaic into Greek, and finally into "Blessed are the peacemakers." But any certainty we may feel about this is entirely a matter of faith. Muslims are in the same position regarding their own scriptures, as has recently been explored by a contributor to our Journal (who should be attending our conferences). I am referring to Jonathan Brown's article of 2009, "Did the Prophet Say It or Not? The Literal, Historical, and Effective Truth of Hadiths in Early Sunnism," (1) which shows how the Muslims recognised and dealt with the fact that the record of the words and deeds of the Prophet Muhammad, collectively known as the Hadith or Traditions, was, to say the least, epistemologically vulnerable.

He compares this with the Gettysburg Address: even though we have four copies in President Lincoln's own hand, there are enough divergences between them and the newspaper accounts of the actual delivery of the Address to force us to the conclusion that "as an object of literal truth, the speech does not exist." (2)

Brown's focus is on the Traditions of the Prophet, but I shall extend his approach here to include the Qur'an as well. To be sure the two texts are different in kind: one is a divine revelation transmitted impersonally through rote-learning, the other a vast documentation of specific events in the Prophet's life, each account personally authenticated by an eye-witness and transmitted through named intermediaries. But in spite of their ontological difference, both the Qur'an and the Health are a literary construct made selectively from the variants gathered together in the approved canonical collections.

With this in mind, I would like to consider a passage of the Qur'an which is remarkably similar to the Gettysburg Address in its length, its indeterminate textual state, and its iconic nature. It is the chapter which occupies the first page of the Qur'an, hence called the Fat* "the opener" (though historically it is not the oldest revelation), and, since ii is so short, I will read it out in the translation of George Sale, of 1734, one of the least polemical and, by virtue of its eighteenth-century English, the most dignified renderings we have:

1. In the name of the most merciful God. 2. Praise be to God, the Lord of all creatures; 3. the most merciful, 4. the king of the day of judgment. 5. Thee do we worship, and of thee do we beg assistance. 6. Direct us in the right way, 7. in the way of those to whom thou hast been gracious; not of those against whom thou art incensed, nor of those who go astray.

   These seven short verses are as familiar to every Muslim as the Gettysburg Address to Americans, and are recited on numerous occasions, including the five daily prayers. For many believers this may be all they know of the Qur'an by heart.

   Yet each verse has variants, unknown to the ordinary Muslim, who recites the text in a form which was arbitrarily fixed by a process which began in the tenth century.

   Phonologically, in verse 6 "Direct us in the right way" the word for "way" (ultimately borrowed from Latin strata) is normally written and pronounced as firat with velarised ts, but is also spelt and recited with unvelarised s (sirat) or even with z (zirat).

   Morphologically in verse 4, "King of the day of judgment," Sale has opted for the reading malik "king," but the canonical text has the participle maul( "possessor, possessing," translated as "wielder, master, ruler, etc." of the day of judgment. In yet another variant the word is read as the verb malaka "who rules the day of judgment."

   Syntactically in verse 7 the phrases "not of those against whom thou art incensed, nor of those who go astray" are in apposition to "the way of those to whom thou hast been gracious" in verse 6 and inflected accordingly, but they may also be inflected as adverbial phrases, "excluding those against whom thou art incensed, etc."

   Lexically in verse 6 the verb ihdina "direct us" is replaced by the synonym arshidna "Guide us."

   Taking these and the other variants into account (including disagreement on the precise division and numbering of these few verses!), we can truly say, as did Jonathan Brown of the Gettysburg Address, that the original form of this passage will never be known. The same applies to the Qur'an as a whole, and although over time a preference for one particular set of readings has produced something like an "authorised" version, the variants are all still preserved, and along with them the uncertainty.

   In the transmission of the kiadith, as already mentioned, the variants have also been collected and their authenticity evaluated, but what I want to look at now is the mistakes made in the transmission of kladith, rather than the variants.

   As far as I know, there is no comparable treatment of mistakes made in the transmission of the Qur'an--these would simply have been corrected in the manuscripts. When it came to printing, the Qur'an seems to have been luckier than the Bible: I have not explored the topic in any depth, but an examination of the brief errata list of a Qur'an printed in Qazan in 1911 shows that they are harmless: there are no catastrophic typos such as in an English Bible of 1631, where Exodus 20 v. 14 appears as "Thou shalt commit adultery."

   The material I am going to present here is from a work entitled islah ghalat al-mulgaddithin "Correction of the error of the kladith transmitters," by Abu Sulayman klamd al-Khattali, (3) who died in 388/998 and who lived, therefore, in the century when the principles of legal and grammatical theory were in their early stage of formulation.

   Many of the mistakes are orthographical, involving misreadings of the diacritical points of the consonants, thus sha'abut "scattered, put asunder" is wrongly transmitted as shaghabat "stirred up, excited"; khabuta "he was humble" is read as khabutha "he was lowly, vile."

   Vowels likewise are often confused: al-'urush, a part of Mecca, is misread as al-'arsh "the throne"; for ukla "a morsel of food" the ignorant say akla, which is "a single act of eating"; mayta "dead creature, carrion" is wrongly transmitted as mita "way of dying."

   In one Hadith Muhammad is said to pass judgment like a "king" (malik) or like an "angel" (malak), where al-Khattabl can only say that he prefers the first, because judgment comes from God, but either is possible (the standard...