Reading the Quran with Richard Bell.

• Author: Rippin, A.
• Position: Koran

BORN IN SCOTLAND IN 1876 AND educated at Edinburgh, receiving degrees in both Semitic studies and divinity, Richard Bell(1) came to some prominence in the field of the study of the Quran and early Islam with the publication in expanded form of his 1925 Edinburgh University Gunning Lectures, under the title The Origin of Islam in its Christian Environment.(2) A little over a decade later he published the work for which he has become most famous (and infamous), The Quran, Translated, with a Critical Re-arrangement of the Surahs.(3) In the preface to that work, Bell mentioned that "owing to the cost of printing, the mass of notes which have been accumulated in the course of the work have had to be suppressed". In the decades surrounding the appearance of his translation, he also published a series of 15 articles on Muhammad and the Quran dedicated to explaining the ideas and principles lying behind his work.(4) Finally, just before his death in 1952, he was able to bring together some class lectures which provided a full explanation of his views on the Quran, something which he felt was desirable because they "have not always been understood"; these lectures appeared as Introduction to the Quran.(5) In a publisher's note to the Introduction, mention was made once again of Bell's notes to his translation, which, it was clarified, were not the same as this text; the notes, it was said, "may be published if circumstances permit". In 1991, circumstances appear to have prevailed and the massive, two-volume A Commentary on the Quran(6) has appeared. Having apparently lingered in microfilm form (the original typescript is reported to have gone missing) in a cupboard of Edmund Bosworth for some twenty years, these are Bell's notes to his translation which he had been revising for publication in the years before his death.

Assessments of Bell's scholarship have varied radically over the years. A recent attempt to rehabilitate the theories of Bell (whose analysis of the Quran, it is stated, "has often been misunderstood or ignored by later writers.... But it must be remembered that Bell was a pioneer in this field ..."(7)) is matched by strident condemnations of the work of this "Scottish crackpot."(8) Indeed, for some people, Bell seems to have become a prime representative of Christian-Orientalist bias; looking at some of his works in the library recently, I discovered that someone had written at the end of the preface to Origin, under the name Richard Bell, "F*** you son-of-an-infidel whore!" and his Introduction was defaced throughout, although in more reasoned language. These sorts of comments do not, of course, reflect an understanding of Richard Bell's principles of scholarship, only a reaction to his most infamous act, reordering the text of the Quran by cutting it up into little bits.

Bell's approach to the Quran developed, according to his own statements, while he was preparing his lectures which were published as Origin.(9) When asking the question, "what was the role of Christianity in the rise of Islam?" he saw a unifying development of that theme at work in the text of the Quran. He came to rely on this insight because of the untrustworthy nature of Muslim tradition, especially as related to the first part of Muhammad's life, and because of the confusion which he sensed in the text of the Quran. Bell saw evidence of Muhammad's own revisions in the Quran and he argued that all of the suras, even the shortest ones, were of a composite nature. Viewing Muhammad's career in relation to his increasing knowledge of and contact with Christianity was Bell's overall insight. "The key to a great deal both in the Quran and in the career of Muhammad lies, as I hope to show, just in his gradual acquisition of knowledge of what the Bible contained and of what Jews and Christians believed" (Origin, 68-69). Much of this reconstruction depended upon a psychological reconstruction of Muhammad. "Muhammad was a visionary, no doubt, but he was not a crack-brained enthusiast. He was a very practical character.... He had the mystic quality of a seeker after truth but that did not destroy his practical bent.... His enterprise was, in my opinion, from the very start quite a rational and practical one ..." (Origin, 71-72). This attempt to reconstruct the inner workings of Muhammad's experiences and aims provided Bell with a principle by which the order of the Quran could be understood. That the Quran could be seen to confirm that reconstruction--that is, that a coherent whole emerged out of a perceived jumble--added validity to the initial reconstruction. Regarding the circularity in such a process, using the Quran especially in the Meccan period to deduce historical progression in order to be able to reformulate the Quran into a historical order, Bell simply urges that this "calls for careful consideration and prolonged discussion" (Quran, 690).

Certain central themes are mentioned by Bell as providing the details that go along with the overall reconstruction; these themes have been isolated by J. E. Merrill and W. M. Watt in earlier studies of Bell's work and there is no need to repeat those details here.(10) Notably however, progressive change in emotion as linked to the style of the Quran was not considered by Bell to be a major basis for analyzing the text, as it had been by Noldeke. Emotion, Bell suggests, may reoccur and style can be varied according to the dictates of the situation. Those factors, therefore, cannot be reliable guides in chronology. Matters such as relations with the Jews and Christians, use of certain elements of vocabulary and details of ritual performance all provided Bell with what he considered more credible criteria.

The Quran, for Bell, was revealed in short passages which may be distinguished through two means: form and content, and linguistic and rhythmic patterns. Abrupt change in rhyme patterns, repetition of rhyme words, rupture in grammatical structure, sudden variation in verse length, and unwarranted shift in personal pronouns all point to revisions undertaken by Muhammad due to a change in purpose sometime during his career. Bell suggests that three periods may be separated in Muhammad's career: the early period in which "signs" and praise of God play the predominant role; next, the Quran period which covers the later Meccan and Medinan era up to the year 2 A.H.; and finally the Book period which is from the year 2 A.H. on.(11) Bell speaks of this in the following terms: "|Muhammad~ began as the advocate of a renewed religion of gratitude to the one supreme God, that faced with unbelief and rejection, he enforced his message by the threat of punishment, first in the form of calamity falling upon special unbelieving peoples, and that then as he acquired more knowledge of Christianity and Judaism, he substituted for, or combined with this, the eschatological ideas of Judgment to come and the punishments and rewards of the future life ..." (Quran, 690).

The demands of these changed situations and plans in Muhammad's life meant that it was necessary to change certain passages of the Quran to fit into the new context. The resulting unevenness was aggravated by the later collection of the text. Disjunctions in the Quran, which cannot be attributed to Muhammad's deliberate attempts to change the import of certain passages, are accounted for by speaking of documents being put together in a mechanical way; material written on the "back" of a "page" was placed following on from what was on the front by compilers who were faced with a stack of material and who did not know where it all belonged. Along with the deliberate reorganization of the material by Muhammad himself, this resulted in frequent duplication and unevenness throughout the text.

Bell's theories do not appear in a scholarly vacuum and some contextualization of his work helps elucidate its underlying principles and its significance. Biblical studies may well be suggested as a likely context, especially since some might wish to argue that Bell's accomplishment was to apply certain methods developed in Biblical studies to the Quran. Notably, Bell's books carry few references to contemporary Biblical scholarship other than occasional mention of editions of the Bible and Apocrypha.(12) But in terms of the general intellectual climate in turn-of-the-century Scotland, there is little doubt that ideas of Tendenzkritik and an increasingly prominent Form Criticism may be seen to be playing a role in every intellectual endeavor in religious studies of the era.

The Wellhausen documentary hypothesis of the Bible was fully entrenched in certain intellectual circles of England and Scotland by the 1890s and was widespread by the 1920s.(13) It is worth remembering what the accomplishment of Wellhausen was:

Wellhausen did not invent critical methods; he merely applied them very skillfully. His own particular contribution was to...