Bible Borrowing-A Refutation
by Khalid al-Khazraji, Mustafa Ahmed, Qasim Iqbal,
'Abd ar-Rahmaan Robert Squires, M S M
Saifullah & Muhammad Ghoniem
Assalamu-alaikum wa rahamatullahi wa barakatuhu:
With a view to showing the influence of Judeo - Christian traditions on the Qur'an some scholars have pointed out parallels in the Bible and the Qur'an. The implication is that Muhammad had carefully studied previous scriptures and selected or "borrowed" those portions which appeared consistent to him. Some of these borrowing theories which are repeated often by Christian missionaries can be seen at the following sites:
Now that the atheists have also joined the ranks of Christians in 'borrowing' the borrowing theories, some of their arguments can be seen at:
The refutation is based on the work of Hamza Mustafa Njozi and we have updated/used some of the work.
The Bible borrowing theory can be divided into three chronologically overlapping phases. This also shows the maturity of Oriental scholarship and its attitude towards the Qur'an.
The first one in chronological order is that the Qur'an was borrowed from the Bible. This assertion is because of the fact that in the Qur'an there are stories similar to that of the Bible and hence the former borrowed from the later. In his Islam and the West: A Historical Cultural Survey, Philip K. Hitti says:
The sources of the Qur'an are unmistakable: Christian, Jewish and Arab heathen[1].
Allegedly, Muhammad's(P) knowledge of the Bible was acquired gradually:
The key to a great deal both in the Qur'an and in the career of Muhammad lies ... just in his gradual acquisition of knowledge of what the Bible contained and what the Jews and Christians believed ... we shall see him... consciously borrowing - he is quite frank about it.[2]
This of course, is a claim unsupported by evidence. As the Oriental scholarship advanced, it realized that there was no translation of the Arabic Bible, either the Old Testament or the New Testament, before the Qur'an was compiled. There was also no seat of Christianity or Judiasm in Makkah where Muhammad spent his entire lifetime before the revelations were sent by God. Under Christianity in Arabia the New Catholic Encyclopaedia says that during the time of the Muhammad(P)
The Hijaz [Arabian peninsula] had not been touched by Christian preaching. Hence organisation of the Christian church was neither to be expected nor found.[3]
And then came more trouble of pin-pointing the exact source of the Qur'an. There ranged a considerable debate among the Orientalists concerning the origins of the Qur'an and there is no consensus as the New Catholic Encyclopaedia puts it:
Non-Moslem scholarship has taken a different view of the matter. It has nearly always held that the major influences on Mohammed must have been principally, but not exclusively, Jewish and Christian, and that those influences were colored by Mohammed's own character and made over to conform to aspects and need of the pre-Islamic Arabian mind. Within this broad framework, however, opinions have clashed. The prize dissertations of Abraham Geiger, the Jewish reformist, stimulated much of the modern scholarly discussion; in it he argued for a dominant Jewish influence on the Koran. An opposing view, holding that influence to have been chiefly Gnostic, won the powerful support of Julius Wellhausen. The latter view was followed by many scholars until more recent studies, for example those by Charles Torrey and Abraham Katsh, persuasively argued again for a greater Jewish influence.[4]
Even the modern scholarship appears to be in a state of confusion to explain the source of the Qur'an. Steven Wasserstrom briefly describes the origins of the borrowing theories and its unsuccessful application to the Qur'an's sources:
Early academic students of the origins of Islam shared certain scholarly pre-dispositions with contemporaneous students of the origins of Christianity. In both cases, the search for "influence and borrowing" was instrumental in depicting new religions as essentially derived from earlier religions. Thus, reading the older Islamicists, one gains the impression that the Prophet Muhammad was little more than an ignorant anthologist who misunderstood and thus corrupted the many Jewish and Christian materials he uncomprehendingly collected. Maxime Rodinson has analyzed the range of such arguments, most of which simply pluck names, phrases, images, and narratives from the Qur'an and point out a Jewish or Christian text as the alleged "source" from which the Qur'an "borrowed". The operative reconstruction behind this ever-successful search for borrowings was that Muhammad listened to Jewish and Christian merchants and/or preachers at the annual trade fairs of his native Mecca. What he heard or say later, crudely, stitched together into the Qur'an.
There has been a particularly vigorous enthusiasm among Jewish scholars to find rabbinic derivations for Qur'anic materials. This practice was inaugurated by Abraham Geiger, later the founder of the Reform movement, who wrote his dissertation in 1832 on Muhammad's borrowing from rabbinic literature. In the early years of this century, Josef Horovitz could still author a detailcd analysis of Qur'anic nomenclature and figures along the same lines. After World War II, an Amcrican rabbi, Abraham Katsh, could even write an entire book comprising a line-by-line rabbinic gloss on the first 2 - of 114! - suras of the Qur'an.
Similar arguments were put forth, and continued to be put forth, which argue that the Jewish source from which Muhammad "borrowed" was not rabbinic Judaism but rather some form of sectarianism, Jewish, quasi-Jewish, or otherwise. Samaritan sources were found, and Jewish Christian, and Mandean, and Manichean. Perhaps because no one could ever make a convincing argument for exclusively Jewish or exclusively Christian borrowings, a particularly popular hypothetical "influence peddling" was said to be that of the Jewish Christian sects, Jewish groups who acknowledged Jesus as a prophet but not as a Messiah: a fair-sized and still-growing literature exists in this connection.[5]
Therefore, the Oriental scholars without any solid evidence, ran into problems with these facts at hand. The natural course would be to 'explain' the origin of the Qur'an through other means. This marks the second chronological stage in the advancement of Oriental scholarship. Ilse Lichtenstadter in her work Introduction To Classical Arabic Literature says:
Any reader of the Koran is struck by the fact that the stories dealing with Biblical personalities - both Old and New Testament ones - do not tally with their 'parallels' in the Torah or the Gospels. Western scholars used to accuse Muhammad with distorting the Biblical stories; they charged him of ignorance of the Old Testament versions as the Jews of his own time and environment had done. Neither his contemporaries nor his later-day critics, nor, for that matter, the Muslims Believers themselves, understood the reasons for the lack of conformity between the Koranic and the Biblical or Gospel versions of events. Even if we accept the customary argument that the Koranic account is garbled and that it does not conform to the Biblical original, the discrepancies should be explained only as a result of Muhammad's use of the Biblical story and in the manner in which he told it. He saw himself reflected in the earlier warners and prophets and emphasized those aspects in their story that resembled his own situation. Like them, he was exorting his people by divine command, only to find himself rejected and his preaching disregarded. He identifies himself with them and saw in the fate that befell those earlier unrepenting sinners an example of what would happen to Mecca if it rejected his warnings.[6]
Kenneth Cragg says in his book Call Of The Minaret:
The Biblical narratives reproduced in the Qur'an differ considerably and suggest oral, not direct acquaintance. There is almost complete absence of what could be claimed as direct quotation from the Bible.[7]
So, 'explanations' were given to explain the differences in the stories between the Qur'an and the Bible. The explanations were tagged with Muhammad's(P) confused view of the 'history'.
W M Watt ponders in his book Muhammad At Medina:
One of the remarkable features of the relationship between Muslims and Christians is that neither Muhammad nor any of the Companions seems to have been aware of some of the fundamental Christian doctrines. Apart from the reference to the crucifixion (which is primarily a denial of Jewish claim), and the mention of the twelve apostles as the 'helpers' of Jesus, and of the miracles of healing and raising the dead, there is nothing in the Qur'an about the adult life and teaching of Jesus as recorded in the New Testament. The early Muslims gave Jesus the title Messiah (Masih) but did not appreciate that it involved a claim to be 'God's anointed'. They did not understand the distinctive work of Jesus in redeeming the world and atoning for its sins. They did not realize that the Holy Spirit was regarded by Christians as the third person in the Godhead. It is indeed remarkable that there should have been among the Muslims over such a wide area this absence of knowledge of Christianity. The blame for this state of affairs probably rests on those Christians with whom Muhammad and his Companions were in contact, who may themselves have had little appreciation of the doctrines mentioned. Nevertheless the 'absence of knowledge' remains, and in the thirteen centuries since Muhammad's time few Muslims have done anything to fill the lacuna.[8]
Oriental scholars have realized that various explanations have been given but none of them are defendible. This of course, is the third chronological stage in Oriental scholarship. Roger DuPasquier sums it all up rather nicely:
To this day no-one has put forward a defensible explanation of how an unlettered caravan merchant of the early seventh century might have been able, by his own devices, to produce a text of such inimitable beauty, of such capacity to stir emotion, and which contained knowledge and wisdom which stood so far above the ideas current among makind at that time. The studies carried out in the West which try to determine the 'sources used by Muhammad', or to bring to light the psychological phenomenon which enabled him to draw the inspiration from his 'subconscious', have demonstrated only one thing: the anti-Muslim prejudice of their authors.[9]
After reading this we can wind up the discussion and say good-bye to the topic. But let us go further and examine various ridiculous statement in details which the Christian Missionaries have been talking about.