Life After Death_ A History of the Afterlife in Western Religion - Alan Segal [395]
What do they desire another din (religion, way of conduct) than God’s, and to Him has surrendered (’aslama) whoso is in the heaven and the earth, willingly or unwillingly, and to Him they shall be returned?
Say: “We believe in God and that which has been sent down to us, and sent down on Abraham and Ishmael, Isaac and Jacob, and the Tribes, and in that which was given to Moses and Jesus, and the Prophets, of their Lord; we make no distinction between any of them, and to Him we surrender (muslimun).” (Q 3:83-84)9
Muḥammad may be understood as calling everyone to a moral life, respecting Judaism and Christianity, and using the Day of Judgment of those religions to extend the moral choice to the peoples of the Hejaz: “Believers are friends one to the other to the exclusion of outsiders. To the Jew who follows us belong help and equality. He shall not be wronged nor shall his enemies be aided. The peace of believers is indivisible.”10 There were limits to his toleration (Muḥammad dealt harshly with those who opposed him militarily) but the pattern of his intentions is clear enough. Later tradition, though, usually interprets these passages to mean that neither Jews nor Christians will share the benefits of the resurrection, although they are to be tolerated.11
The Prophet spoke about and received good advice on how best to govern the growing ummah (community) of Islam. After the Prophet’s death, it became more what we might recognize as a purification movement, in some ways like Judaism, except with fewer “special laws.” Compared to Judaism and Christianity, the demands of Islam are elegant in their simplicity.12
Study of the Quran
SOME OF THE ambiguity about earliest Islam may be due to the way in which the Quran has come down to us. When Islam was first studied in the West, a number of scholars (and Ernest Renan perhaps foremost among them) pointed out that, unlike Judaism and Christianity, whose origins are lost in the darkness of time, the foundation of Islam took place “in the full light of history.”13 Hence, it ought to be easier to study. That first impression turns out to be mistaken. The most important reports about Muḥammad (ca. 570-632 CE) are all written long enough after the fact by people deeply impressed with the message of Islam so as to look suspicious to secular scholars. They are, essentially, as reliable as the early Christian writings or the writings in the Pentateuch and subject to the same kinds of historical constraints, although there are far more of them than exist for early Christianity.14 Muḥammad personally touched far more lives than Jesus could in his short, earthly career. The modern, scholarly study of the Quran is, however, in its infancy.
The present Quran was compiled from separate prophecies ascribed to Muḥammad edited during the reign of ’Uthman (644-656 CE), the third Khalifa (Calif, literally: “successor”). All versions of the Quran which disagreed with his version were destroyed. ’Uthman was killed by the fourth Khalifa ’Ali, who in turn succumbed to the Umayyads by 661 when the Umayyad Dynasty was firmly founded. Under these circumstances, some scholars have rightly felt free to reconstrue the early history of Islam, trying to recapture the “original movement” free of ’Uthman’s proto-orthodoxy.
’Uthman’s redaction of the revelations of Muḥammad was not chronological; he put the longest of Muḥammad’s revelations first and the shorter ones later, exactly as the New Testament treats the letters of Paul. The overwhelming consensus of scholars today is that the shorter, more ecstatic utterances are the earliest revelations which Muḥammad received, so the earliest prophecies are actually at the end of the book. Muḥammad eschewed any