Narratives of tampering in the earliest commentaries on the qur'an.

• Author: Powers, David S.
• Position: Book review

Narratives of Tampering in the Earliest Commentaries on the Qur'an. By GORDON NICKEL. History of Christian-Muslim Relations, vol. 13. Leiden: BRILL, 2011. Pp. xx + 244. $146.

A key element of classical and modern Islamic religious doctrine is the charge that Jews and Christians deliberately falsified their respective scriptures and that the preserved texts of the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament are corrupt. The notion of scriptural corruption is encapsulated in the Arabic terms tahrif ('tampering') and tahrif ('alteration'). It is generally thought that the use of these terms in the Qur'an (see, for example, Q 2:59, 4:46, 5:13, and 7:62) already reflects the full-fledged doctrine of textual corruption. In fact, prominent Muslim scholars such as al-Qasim b. Ibrahim (d. 246/860) and Ibn IChaldrm (d. 808/1406) held that tahrif refers to the failure to understand the correct meaning of the text; and this has been the position of much of Western scholarship since at least the beginning of the twentieth century, as explained by Nickel in chapter one, "Islamic Accusations of Falsification." In an article published in 1922, Ignazio Di Matteo argued that in the Qur'an itself the term tahrif refers to the misinterpretation of verses relating to Muhammad or to the failure of Jews to enforce laws found in the Torah. In 1955 W. M. Watt argued that "the Qur'an does not put forward any general view of the corruption of the text of the Old and New Testaments" ("The Early Development of the Muslim Attitude to the Bible," Transactions of the Glasgow University Oriental Society 16 [1955-56], 53). In 1986 Mahmoud Ayoub concluded that the Qur'an accuses Jews and Christians of altering the truths contained in their respective scriptures, not of altering the texts themselves; and in 2003 Martin Accad suggested that it would be useful to reconstruct the process whereby the understanding of tahry' by Muslims shifted from its Qur'anic sense of the failure of Jews and Christians to understand the meaning of their respective scriptures to its classical sense of the alteration of the texts of the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament. This is precisely the project begun by Gordon Nickel in the book under review.

In chapter two, "The Doctrine of Corruption as a Polemical Theme," Nickel reviews Western scholarship on the doctrine of tahrif as "flashpoint of polemic" (p. 15) between Muslims. on the one hand, and Jews and Christians, on the other. The chapter contains a useful review of the writings of M. Stein-schneider, I. Goldziher, M. Schreiner, H. Hirschfeld, I. Di Matteo, E. Fritsch, J-M. Gaudeul, R. Caspar, C. Adang, and H. Lazarus-Yafeh. This survey is followed by treatment of the difference between tahrif al-mdna 'the distortion of meaning' and tahrif al-nag 'the distortion of text'. Arguably the first Muslim scholar to make the argument for textual distortion was the Muctazili historian al-Maqdisi in his Kitab al-Bad' wa-l-ta'rikh (composed ca. 355/966). A century later Ibn Hazm (d. 456/1064) laid out the doctrine of textual distortion in a systematic manner, apparently for the first time. For the next eight hundred years or so, Nickel asserts, the twin accusations of distortion of meaning and distortion of text continued...