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Literature and history.com Literature and history listeners two or three times a decade I send a podcast recommendation your way. I don't do it because anybody pays me. I do it because I think the show that I'm recommending is surpassingly awesome and that you guys will enjoy it. The podcast I wanted to recommend is Kevin Stroud's the History of English. The History of English is something that your host has been listening to since before he ever started Literature and History, and one of the programs that inspired me to start this one. The History of English traces the English language's development way back to its Indo European roots, through early Greek, the Phoenician Alphabet, and then Latin, the beginning of German and the fragmentation of Latin in the former Roman world during late antiquity. After exploring how the Gothic language found its way into former Roman provinces and the linguistic mishmash that existed in northern Europe among Angles, Saxons, Jutes and Frisians, Kevin arrives at the Anglo Saxon invasion around his 30th episode and then goes on to offer what is, in my opinion, the finest and most detailed summary of the Old English language and Old English literature out there in the world of educational audio. It only gets better from there. From the Northumbrian Renaissance to Beowulf, Cynewulf, King Alfred, the impact of Old Norse, the end of the Anglo Saxon Golden Age, and the Norman conquest of 1066, Kevin moves forward through the Anglo Norman hegemony and the slow emergence of Middle English, the impact of the Black Death on Anglophone culture, Piers Plowman, Chaucer, the Gawain or Gawain poet, the Great Vowel Shift, the history of the 17th century Shakespeare, the globalization of English, and how globalization affected the development of the language. With 185 episodes out and more to come, centuries of history covered and dozens of linguistic confluences explored, the History of English lives up to its monumental title. If you like literature and history, you will like the History of English. Both shows are chronological, starting at the beginning. They're both aggregative, so you learn more and more as you go along. They are both single narrator programs with no ads or blather about what we had for breakfast, and Kevin is a stupendous teacher, and he's popular because he covers the material in a thorough, intellectually responsible way. Just as our podcast uses literary texts to help understand history, Kevin will teach you how the fabric of the English language itself is full of wonderful lessons about the collisions of civilizations and the flow of history more generally. So if you're jonesing to get to medieval European history. And if all of our time over in West Arabia in this season has you craving the foggy North Sea and the ancient roots of English, you should jump over to historyofenglishpodcast.com or just type History of English into your podcast player. There's also a link to it in this show's notes. Hello and welcome to Literature and History, Episode 119, the Quran Part 3 Origins in this program we will complete our journey through the Quran, the holy book of Islam revealed to the Prophet Muhammad in the west Arabian cities of Mecca and Medina between about 610 and 630. Over the next two hours or so you will learn about the theological roots of the Quran, its roots in ancient Arabian religion and culture, as well as its roots in Judaism and Christianity. From the Crusades onward in European history, Islam has often been represented as an outland ideology, sharing no earlier heritage with the older religions of the ancient Mediterranean. In this show, by looking carefully at the contents of the Quran and learning just a bit more about the religious history that led up to it, we'll come to understand the book's ideological background. Mecca and Medina were not isolated places as of the year of Muhammad's birth in roughly 570. 570 CE in fact marked the precise 500 year anniversary of the destruction of the Second Temple of Jerusalem in 70 cells by the Roman Emperor Titus. For 500 years after the destruction of the Second Temple, Diasporic Jewish populations had been settling along the back of the Arabian boot and forming Arabic speaking Jewish tribes such as the ones Muhammad knew and worked with over the course of his life. The Hijaz, or western coast of Arabia, which one scholar calls the Eurasian Hinge, was the great geographical, commercial and theological axis of late antiquity. Arid though it may have been, it was anything but isolated and by the lifetime of Muhammad, at least five centuries of Jews and Christians had made their homes there. Fleeing Roman persecutions over the first few centuries ce, Jews left the Roman province of Judea for safer and more tolerant regions in the east like Arabia. Just so escaping various Roman and Sasanian persecutions, different populations of Christians settled in Arabia as well. By the 500s and 600s the Hijaz was speckled with various forms of Syriac Christians, Melkites, Jacobites and Nestorians, along with Copts and Armenian and Ethiopian Christians as well. The western peninsula by the year 500 was also home to Jewish Christian sects like the Nazarenes, Ebionites and Alcacites, in addition to Manichaeans driven out of the Roman empire over the centuries. To put it simply, Muhammad grew up in a city in which pagan polytheists made offerings to idols. He also grew up in a city home to many varieties of Jews, Christians, Jewish Christians and para Christian ideologies. Judaism and Christianity then were at least 500 years deep in Mecca. When the Prophet grew up there, the city was also home to polytheistic pagan cults involving the worship of goddesses like Allat, Manat and Al Aza. This mixture of pagan Arabian religion with Judaism and Christianity created what scholar Sidney Griffith calls a non denominational Abrahamic monotheism in the Hijaz. In Mecca and its sister settlements up and down the Hijazi caravan routes, biblical figures like Abraham, Noah, Jesus and Mary were revered folkloric figures whose legends intermingled with stories about jinn and witches. As with so many other places and times in late antiquity, paganism and Abrahamic religion were not oil and water. They mixed freely, as human cultural traditions generally do, and it's time for us to talk about that mixture and how the Quran demonstrates it. I want to begin this program on the historical origins of the Quran by talking about the Quran's indigenous Arabian roots. The Quran is a thoroughly Abrahamic book, but the Surahs also frequently address the pagan world into which Islam most immediately emerged during its first decade of existence in Mecca. What do we know about polytheism in pre Islamic Arabia and what does the Quran say about it? Mecca's polytheist oligarchy was Islam's greatest enemy in the religion's early years. But did polytheism influence the Quran and the way that it describes God? Let's open up the Quran on one side of our desk and some works of history, archaeology and Islamic studies scholarship on the other, and try to answer these questions. Unless otherwise noted, quotes from the Quran in this episode will come from the Mas Abdel Halim translation published by Oxford World's Classics in 2010. One of the main things that we've learned about monotheist historiography in our podcast is that monotheists are do not tend to tell the truth about polytheists. Religious historians, after all, are not historians of religion. The narrators of the Torah and the deuteronomistic history in the Bible castigate the idol worshipping Israelites and strangers alike in and around the periphery of Jerusalem and forever after in later rabbinical literature, in Christian patristic texts, and in Islamic works of history produced centuries after Muhammad live. Pagan polytheism is imagined as diabolical, sensual, riotous and perverse. A misguided lead up to the monotheist present of little interest other than being an odious and prurient example of what not to do. When the Quran was developing between 610 and 632, the first generations of Muslims were fighting both ideologically and militarily against a polytheist hegemony in Mecca, whose financial interests were enmeshed in the city's spiritual status quo. We would not expect, then, the Quran to have very many kind words about polytheism in Arabia, and indeed it does not. Islamic sources on the indigenous polytheistic religions of the Hijaz, then, including the Qur', an, tend to be condemnatory in tone and not particularly rich in informational content. For hard evidence on Arabian polytheism, we have a fair amount of graffiti and inscriptions at worship sites and tombs, and a few early books from Islamic historians that, while being serviceable sources of information, were never intended as documentary works of religious history. Let's start with archaeology. Dry climates are not ideal for supporting large human populations, but they are often wonderlands for the preservation of ancient historical sites. Pre Islamic Arabian tombs, like the ones up in the Nabataean city of Petra, along with simple cairns scattered throughout Arabia, contain remains buried alongside grave goods like so many other places in the ancient world. Pervasively, as pre Islamic Arabic poetry also suggests, ancient Arabs had beliefs in some sort of afterlife, where possessions that typified who they were could still continue to serve them after they died. Hundreds of inscriptions and graffiti scattered throughout Arabia attest to the unsurprising fact that a vast number of deities were worshipped throughout the peninsula, that they were revered patrons of tribes and guardians of unique physical locations, and that their devotees provided them with prayers and offerings as they sought security, fresh water, fertility, and the promise of good health. Drop generic humans anywhere, it seems, and we will gradually congregate around pretty riverbends and caves, groves and mountain vistas, and deities will emerge from the stories that we invent there. The names of a number of these deities have come forward through time, both in the Quran and in early works of Islamic history. Most famously, many of Muhammad's Meccan contemporaries worshipped a principal deity named Allah. The word in Arabic simply means God, and Allah was a supreme deity and provider figure to the Meccans and others who worshipped him. Allah had three daughters, and their names were Al Latmanat and Al Aza. This theological configuration, a principal deity with three daughters, is the same as the deity BAAL or baal, who also had three daughters and was associated with the ancient city of Ugarit in addition to God's daughters, the Quran also mentions five additional Wed Suah, Yaroth, Yaok and Nasser, though the Quran only tells us that these deities have led many astray. The God Hubel, though mentioned in early Islamic biographies of Muhammad, does not appear in the Quran and nor do three other Meccan deities, Manaf, Isaf and Nailah. For information on these deities apart from the Quran, our richest source of information is the Kitab al Asnam, or Book of Idols, written by the historian Hisham ibn al Kalbi sometime before the author's death in about 819. Al Kalbi's book of Idols is a short catalog of pre Islamic gods and goddesses in Arabia. The Book of Idols, as the name probably implies, has an overall condemnatory attitude toward the bygone gods and goddesses of Arabia, but nonetheless it's a useful source book on indigenous Arab religions prior to the life of Muhammad. Let's take a quick look at Al Kalbi's Book of Idols. Probably not the most reliable book as it takes monotheism's traditionally condemnatory attitude toward the polytheistic past, but still a useful jumping off point. The Book of Idols describes the pre Islamic Kaaba as a place profuse with statues of different gods, statues which had come from all over the place. One of these gods was named Hubello. According to the biographers Ibn Isaq and Atabari, Muhammad's father was nearly sacrificed to the deity Hubel. The historian Al Kalbi recorded that a statue of this God made of red agate came to the Kaaba and was first revered by an ancestor of Muhammad. Al Kalbi writes that the statue stood inside the Kaaba. In front of it were seven divination arrows. These divination arrows with words written on them and functioning like the drawing of straws, were used to determine the parentage of newborns and to make decisions related to the departed marriage and journeys. While Hubel, mentioned in early Islamic biographies related to Muhammad, seems to have been a fairly important idol in the Kaaba, there were numerous others. Among Mecca's pagan deities were a pair named Ysaf and Na'. Ila. The early historian Al Kalbi tells us that Ysaf and Na', Ilah, a pair of young unmarried lovers from Yemen, set out to perform the pilgrimage. Upon their arrival in Mecca, they entered the Kaaba. Taking advantage of the absence of anyone else and of the privacy of the sacred house. Esav committed adultery with her in the sanctuary. Thereupon they were transformed into stone they were then taken out and placed in their respective places. Later on, the Quraish, as well as everyone who came on pilgrimage to the sacred house, worshipped them. It's a pretty weird story, and maybe it's intended as such. Illicit sex in a sacred place, though it turned two young lovers to stone, presumably due to the primordial Abrahamic powers of the Kaaba, also leads to their deification by the Meccans. In Al Kalbi's account, there are a number of other prominent Meccan gods mentioned in the Book of Idols. And in fact, the book begins with those deities mentioned in the Quran again Wed, Suah, Ya', Goth, Yaok and Nesser. The Book of Idols, again set down very roughly around 800, tells us that the deity Wed was the main God of one of the larger tribal groups in Arabia, but nothing else. As for Yargoth, the book offers something similar, attesting that a Yemeni tribe called the Jurash worshipped Yaggoth, and a different tribe still revered the God Yaak. Like the other minor deities mentioned in the Quran, the God Nesser in Al Kalbi's Book of Idols is only described as being the patron deity of the Himyarites prior to about 400 cells. These gods are little more than names in the Quran and the Book of Idols. They're a set of interchangeable figures whose tribal provenances were more interesting than their actual attributes. Though ancient Arabian deities like the Yemeni God Yaroth are mostly lost to history, when we read the Quran and the Book of Idols, we can intuit that many tribes and coalitions of tribes had religion as a force that helped unify them. The sacred grounds around the Kaaba during the life of Muhammad were allegedly home to sculptures of hundreds of deities. If the rest of the ancient world is any clue, the sculptures around the Kaaba were probably totems to tribes and clans who visited the city from time to time or made donations to the Kaaba's maintenance. In much the same way that the ancient Greek pilgrimage sites of Delphi and Eleusis were studded with hundreds of statues and small buildings commissioned by visiting donors. To continue with the subject of pre Islamic Arabian deities, we should talk a bit more about Allah and his daughters, Al Latmanat and Al Aza. Between monotheism and polytheism is henotheism, the belief in numerous gods, but the reverence of one of them in particular. Pre Islamic Mecca, saturated with so much monotheism from centuries of Jewish and Christian presence there, and seems to have been tending toward something like Monotheism prior to Muhammad. Linguistically, the name Allah is likely derived from the Aramaic Allah and the Hebrew Eloah. The Arabic name for God becomes extant in the historical record around the time of the first century CE. Around this time again the years from 1 to 100 CE. In the ancient capital of the inland Kindah kingdom of Arabia, the consonantal root, what we would call lh of the name Allah begins to appear in inscriptions that seem to indicate the name of a specific deity rather than a generic word for God. In pre Islamic Arabic poetry, the high deity Allah is described as a bringer of rain, an architect of human fate and a God of justice. The Arabian roots of the Qur' an then included what scholar Nicolai Sinai aptly calls pagan monotheism, the worship of a multifaceted and universal deity with a Semitically rooted monotheistic name who had been subsuming the fiefdoms of other deities for 500 years prior to Muhammad's birth. What we have called monotheization in previous episodes was a long process and all of the Abrahamic scriptures are snapshots of it taking place. The pre Islamic Arabian deity Allah had daughters and they were by the year 600, important deities in the Hijaz once again Al Latmanat and Al Aza. Al Lat, the Book of Idols tells us, was revered in the city of ta', if, just 30 miles southeast of Mecca. Al Kalbi tells us that Al Lat was, literally speaking, a cubic rock beside which a certain Jew used to prepare his barley porridge. A tribe there had created a shrine around the rock and the Quraysh and other Arabs worshipped the goddess and her stewards were a subgroup of the Banu Taqif, a tribe still rooted in the city of Ta' if today. Al Lat's shrine stood in Ta' if until the tribe converted to Islam and soon thereafter Allat's shrine was destroyed. Ala's daughter Al Lat gets about a page long entry in Al Kalbi's Book of Idols, as does Allah's second daughter Manat, the pre Islamic goddess Manat, the Book of Idols explains, had a seaside shrine between Mecca and Medina and all the Arabs used to venerate her and sacrifice before her and bring her their offerings. Especially the Uz and Khazraj tribes resident in the city of Medina. When the Prophet immigrated there, Arabs, Al Kalbi writes, used to go to the shrine of Manat as part of the pilgrimage circuit to Mecca. In the year 630 though, when Muhammad marched on Mecca about five nights out from Medina, he sent his son in law Ali to destroy Manat's shrine, which Ali did, looting some ancient swords from the shrine. Allah had a final daughter other than Al Lat and Manat and his third daughter, Al Aza has a long and detailed entry in the Book of Idols in contrast to every single other deities, which seems to indicate that Al Aza was once particularly important. Al Aza, the book explains, was a newer deity, but she was the greatest idol among the Quraysh. They used to journey to her, offer gifts under her and seek her favors through sacrifice. Al Aza had a shrine down the Hijazi road to Taif, and according to Al Kalbi, her name was chanted by those who circumambulated the Ka'. Ba. The Book of Idols states that the Quran's denunciation of Al Azza proved very hard upon the Quraysh and includes a sort of ghost story about the destruction of Al Aza's sacred site. In this story, Muhammad's companion Khalid IBN Al Walid, recently converted to Islam, was sent to a valley called Nakhala where three trees stood to destroy the shrine of Al Aza. Khalid proceeded with the destruction of the site. He saw nothing after cutting down the first tree in Al Azza's valley, he saw nothing after cutting down the second tree. But then Khalid was shocked to see the goddess Al Aza herself in the form of an Abyssinian woman with disheveled hair and her hands placed on her shoulders, gnashing and grating her teeth. The pagan shrine's guardian sent the embodied deity to kill Khalid, but instead Khalid chopped her head in half and she crumbled to ashes, after which Khalid killed the shrine's guardian as well. And just as the Book of Idols reports the destruction of the worship sites of Aloh's daughters Al Lat Manat and Al Aza. The section on these three concludes the with this terse story about the end of idol worship at the when on the day he conquered Mecca, Muhammad appeared before the Kaaba, he found the idols arrayed around it. Thereupon he started to pierce their eyes with the point of his arrow, saying truth is come and falsehood is vanished. Muhammad then ordered that they be knocked down, after which they were taken out and burned. This is a story we've heard before and really the general purport of Al Kalbi's Book of Idols. As Al Kalbi puts the Arabs were passionately fond of worshipping idols, but Islam emphatically put an end to the messy and ungovernable epoch of idol worship on the peninsula. So that's a quick tour of the basic source materials on pagan religion in the city of Mecca in about the year 600. There's plenty more to say on the subject and plenty of scholarship, but the main focus of this podcast episode is the Quran and its attitude toward the polytheistic atmosphere of Western Arabia during the early 600s. Accordingly, let's open up the Quran for a little while and explore its verses relating to pagan polytheism. In the Quran, pagan polytheists are often called mushrikoon. These polytheists are contrasted with the al al Kitab, or the people of the Book, meaning Jews and Christians, and in the Quran's hierarchy of religious practitioners, the mushrikun are the lowest of all. However, there is a complexity to the way that the Quran discusses the mushrikun, the polytheists or idolaters, and this complexity is easy to miss for those of us who read the book in English. St. Augustine in the City of God writes about pagans with vicious and wholesale dismissal, either confidently discounting them as heretics or smugly intimating that their cultic practices are little different than orgies. The Quran is more nuanced. At times, as St. Augustine does, the Quran takes a snarling and dour stance toward polytheists. At other times, though, using special terminology pertinent to the specific religious climate of Mecca in the early 7th century, the Quran makes specific doctrinal criticisms of the evolving religious climate of Mecca. Rather than blanket dismissals of the city's polytheists, the Quran tells Muslims in regards to the Muslim pagan treaty of al Hudaybiyya in 628. As for those idolaters who have honoured the treaty you believers made with them and who have not supported anyone against you, fulfill your agreement with them to the end of their term. The overall meaning here is simple. Let's honor our treaty with the idolaters and keep up our end of the deal. But the terminology is fascinating. In the verse we just heard, the Quran uses the words those idolaters, or alternately the polytheists, and the Arabic original here is al mushrikeen. This is a fairly important Quranic word, and mushrikun, though commonly translated as idolaters, has a more complex meaning. In the original Arabic, the Quranic word shirk, that's s H I R K when transliterated into English, literally means associating or associating partners with. To be clear, then, the word that we read in English translations of the word Mushrikoon in Arabic that's translated as idolaters actually means associators, or in one scholar's words, impartner. Why is it important that mushrikun means associators rather than idolaters? The basic answer is that the Quran's pure monotheism diametrically opposes the notion that God has associates or partners. The Quran disparages the mushrikun the associators, because while they may have revered the deity Allah, they also associated Allah with other gods, whether daughters or other confederates. The actual meaning of the Quran's word for idolaters invites us to consider the theological climate of the Quran for a moment. When Muhammad had his first revelation in 610 CE, as we have learned so far in this episode, the Kaaba in Mecca had a lot of stuff in and around it. Many statues, many revered rocks, and maybe some commemorative carvings and pillars from the pilgrims of bygone years who had made donations or concordances with the keepers of the sacred site. A lot of tribes came through Mecca and they believed in a lot of stuff. And the site was home to the remnants of centuries of heterogeneous religious activity. Yet Mecca was, theologically speaking, also a place in transition. Meccan society, after five centuries of Jews and Christians being present in the region, not to mention Zoroastria, was congenial toward and perhaps even collectively trending toward monotheism. When the Quran criticizes idolaters, then especially when it uses the word mushrikun, the criticism is of monotheists with residual polytheistic tendencies. More than anything else, the Quran actually says, if you ask mushrikun or associators who created the heavens and earth, they are sure to say God. In other words, the so called associators already understand that a single creator deity made the earth, even though they mistakenly assign partners to this deity. Verses in a different surah begin similarly, but then continue to show the prophets frustration with Meccan monotheists backsliding into polytheism. The Surah says, if you prophet, ask them who created the heavens and earth, they are sure to answer God. So say, consider those other gods you invoke beside him. If God wished to harm me, could those other gods undo that harm? God is enough for me. All those who trust should put their trust in him. This verse and the previous one, along with an additional one elsewhere. And do not state that the Meccan idolaters didn't believe in Allah or God. The emphasis is instead that the associators don't exclusively believe in Allah and that they assign various delegates or partners to God that the Quran emphasizes are false. The transition from polytheism to monotheism in the Hijaz, then, had been happening piecemeal four centuries before the revelations of Muhammad. Judaism, Zoroastrianism, and Christianity had scriptures and relative ideological stability that the more fluid world of Arabian polytheism lacked. When the Quran came into being between 610 and 632, it was emphatically opposed to polytheism. At the same time, though, the Quranic voice has a great many names for God, making clear that although there is absolutely only one God, that God is the Deity of all things once mistakenly associated with other gods. Some central verses making God's manifold properties abundantly clear occur toward the end of Surat al Hashar, or the Gathering, which are as follows in the Penguin Daoud translation He is God beside whom there is no other Deity. He is the Sovereign Lord, the Holy One, the Giver of Peace, the Keeper of Faith, the Preserver, the Almighty, the All Powerful, the Most High Exalted Be God above their idols. He is God the Creator, the Originator, the Modeler. His are the most gracious names. These are marvelous epithets, a list of names that generally emphasize the grandeur and peerlessness of God. But there are far more names for God in the Quran. He is called Rab or Lord Rab Al Alamin or Lord of the Worlds. He's described as Haliq or Creator Al Halaq or All Knowing Creator Alberi or the Originator Al Qahar or the All Powerful Al Hakim or the All Wise Al Jabar or the Compeller Araman or the Merciful Tawab, which means something like the Ever forgiving and most simply Al Karib or the Near. And on the subject of the great many names of God in the Quran, scholar Tim Winter writes, these names effectively define the Muslim universe. Most fundamentally, they save the Quran's anti pagan polemic from collapsing into the adoration of an ineffable Monad. But at the same time they tend to prevent readers from constructing a precise and stable image of the solitary deity. The Quran then constructs a God who inscribes by his own complementary qualities but who seems to transcend them, a God who is fully other but also seems paradoxically open to meaningful analogies with created things. Allah in the Quran may just be one thing, but he contains multitudes, and in his myriad of epithets he subsumes the dominions and attributes of previous deities, the Surahs make polytheism unnecessary because Allah is the God of all things for which there have ever been gods. So that should give you a sense of the immediate Arabian and moreover Meccan background of the Quran. The book did not appear in a sudden flash within a world of polytheistic idolaters, but instead a world where gradients of worshippers spanned the gamut from pious monotheistic Jews to fully polytheistic tribespeople to a great many non denominational pseudo monotheists in between, many of them quite familiar with Judaism and Christianity. Read within its immediate theological context, the Quran appears less of a radical departure from the religious status quo and more of a firm nudge in the direction in which this status quo had already been headed. And the himself more of a religious reformer and synthesizer than a disruptive interloper. Those who found Muhammad the most disruptive were the Meccan oligarchs, whose business interests depended on the status quo of the pilgrimage circuit there. And over the past couple of generations, scholars like Montgomery Watt have explored how, quote, the commercialization of Mecca led to growing inequality, social and economic injustices, and a breakdown of certain norms of conduct among Arab tribesmen that seemed to demand a more ethically religious structure in a region of Arabia with grinding income inequality, where increased contact with sophisticated foreign religions was beginning to make the Meccan oligarchs cluttered pantheon seem outdated. The God described in the Quran, who did everything that every God had ever done, and who loved and forgave everyone equally proved a very appealing deity. In a moment, I want to turn to the subject of the Abrahamic roots of the Quran. In other words, the book's frequent mentions of biblical figures and retellings of their stories. Before we do that, though, there is another important indigenous Arabian element of the Quran that we should discuss, and that is the book's numerous references to Jinn or Al Jini in Arabic. The Bible and the Quran both talk about God, angels, Satan, Jesus and John the Baptist, but only the Quran talks about jinn. That's J I n n, not the drink, of course. Jinn, invisible creatures, neither evil nor good, that were created alongside humanity and share the world with us to this day. Before and after the Quran came along, jinn were and still are one of the Arabian Peninsula's great contributions to the folklore of the world. Muhammad would have heard stories about jinn growing up as a child, both in Mecca as well as during his time being raised by a Bedouin wet nurse up in the Hijazi highlands. As scholar Ali Olomi writes to the Ancient Arab the world was teeming with invisible life. The desert may appear barren to the untrained eye, but upon closer examination, it is full of unseen powers and entities. It is in the desert, with its dunes and mountains, where the jinn made their home. Such jinn could be mischievous or dangerous, like nature itself. The desert sandstorm and the strange sounds at night were all viewed as manifestations of the jinn. And the canny traveler knew how to be careful. Jinn in pre Islamic Arabia sometimes had angelic qualities and sometimes diabolical qualities, and sometimes even the properties of deities. Their name likely has roots in the Syriac word guinea itself, with ties to the Latin genius or personal spirit, or genius and genius loci. Genius loci, or spirit of a place. Jinn are a common presence in the Quran, a caste of beings also created by God, but older than humanity. Intriguingly, in Surat al Hajar, in the Quran, God states that we created man out of dried clay formed from dark mud. The jinn we created before from the fire of scorching wind. Similarly, another surah, citing creation as miraculous, remembers how God created mankind out of dried clay like pottery, the jinn out of smokeless fire. Having given jinn a memorable creation story, the Quran also offers the most of an entire surah. Surat al Jinn, the Quran's 72nd Surah, explains how the jinn have responded to the Quran and more broadly tells us what kind of beings they are. The surah, devoted to Jinn, tells us that the jinn have come to believe in the Quran after hearing it. Jinn, like humanity, have learned from the Quran that God is a singular being with neither a wife nor any children. The jinn, the Quran says, approached the outer verges of heaven, listening to learn what lay beyond its guarded ramparts of shooting stars. Some of them doubting that God was capable of resurrection. And they wondered about the fates of sentient beings down on earth. And Surat al Jinn concludes that men have sought refuge with the jinn in the past, but they only misguided them. Further, some jinn are righteous and others less so. They follow different paths. Some jinn submit to him and others go the wrong way. The jinn, as you've just heard, sometimes sound like friendly guardian spirits and sometimes like mischievous agents of chaos, a group of created beings older than humanity that also sometimes struggle against the divine order of God. While Surat al Jinn, for the most part introduces jinn as ambivalent and morally neutral, elsewhere in the Quran, they tend more toward mischief and rebelliousness. Humans in The Quran are said to have invisible companions or qareen, who tempt them into illicit choices. The book states, God assigns an evil qareen as the comrade for whoever turns away from the revelations of the Lord of mercy. The qareen, or assigned companion, is a jinn like figure, unseen and capable of nudging any human in potentially dubious moral directions. Sometimes in the Quran, jinn serve people as the biblical King Solomon was served by hosts of jinn who made for him whatever he wanted palaces, statues, basins as large as water troughs, and fixed cauldrons. More often, however, jinn in the Quran mean trouble. There is a being in the Quran whose name is Iblis. The Quran tells us this about God said to the angels, bow down before Adam. And they all bowed down. But not Iblis. He was one of the jinn and he disobeyed his Lord's command. Are you people going to take him and his offspring as your masters instead of God? This anecdote that the other angels and jinn bowed down before Adam upon the moment of creation, but not Iblis, appears a number of times in the Quran. Elsewhere in the Quran, God recalls how we said to the angels, bow down before Adam. And they did, but not Iblis. He was not one of those who bowed down. God said, what prevented you from bowing down as I commanded you? And Iblis said, I am better than him. You created me from fire and him from clay. God said, get down from here. This is no place for your arrogance. Get out. You are contemptible. If this story sounds familiar, it's about to sound even more familiar as we read what follows in Surat Al Araf. In the Penguin Tariff, Khalidi Iblis said, defer my judgment until the day when they are resurrected. You shall be so deferred. Iblis said, inasmuch as you have led me astray, I shall lie in wait for them along your straight path. Then I shall assail them from their front and from their backs, from their right and from their left. Nor will you find most of them to be thankful. God said, begone, accursed and outcast. As for those among them who follow you, I shall fill hell with you all. And you, Adam, dwell with your wife in the garden and eat whatever you wish, but do not come near that tree, or else you will be sinners. Iblis, then in the Koran, was sometimes a genie and sometimes an angel, but most often he is described as a shaitan or devil. The Abrahamic religions, which posited a beneficent God ruling over an imperfect world have always struggled with the problem of evil, inventing various origin stories to explain the sources of malfeasance and suffering. And there was in Abrahamic religion prior to Islam, a mostly non scriptural story about a fallen angel who, jealous of humanity, rebelled against God and was tossed down to earth as punishment. This narrative was a central part of largely forgotten Christian sects like Manichaeism and Gnosticism. A version of it appeared in the roughly second century BCE books of first Enoch and Jubilees. And by the time Muhammad was born, apocryphal scriptures like the questions of Bartholomew and the life of Adam and Eve had recounted the legend of a jealous celestial prince, first Mastema and then Azazel, and increasingly later Satan. A single line in the Gospel of Luke has buttressed this largely non biblical story. Jesus says in Luke, I watched Satan fall from heaven like a flash of lightning. The operatic saga of Milton's Paradise Lost, which most of us think is in the Bible, is a vast para Christian narrative tacked to tiny scraps of scripture. This narrative though, as we just saw, makes it into the Quran, and indeed it does so at several junctures. Iblis, the only named jinn in the Quran, is similar to the Satan of non biblical Christian traditions. Iblis though, was not the name of Satan for Christian Arabs like the ones Muhammad would have known. And today the origins of the name Iblis are uncertain certain whatever we call him, the Iblis of the Quran, whether he began as an angel or a jinn, following a confrontation with God upon the creation of humanity, was later a Shaitan or devil, and in later Islamic traditions still a Shayateen or the devil. And as we come to the subject of the Quran's portrayal of Adam and Eve and Satan, it's time to move on to discussion the Abrahamic ancestry of the book, how not only the biblical creation story made it into the Quran, but also a sizable number of patriarchs and New Testament figures whose names and stories appear frequently throughout the Quran's 114 surahs. So in this program so far we have talked about some of the native Arabian roots of the Quran, we learned that there were deep monotheistic traditions resident in the Hijaz in the year of the prophet birth. In 570 traditions that had been there for at least 500 years when he was born, almost every variety of monotheists had settled up and down the Hijaz, creating a widespread climate in which singular deities, sovereign over creation and Judgment Day were gradually replacing motley polytheistic pantheons. We learned that the Meccans worshipped numerous gods and that Aloa's daughters Allat Manat and Al Azh were among them, but that at the same time, rather than disparaging polytheists pure and simple, the Quran disparages non believers as mushrikun or associators, emphasizing that the crime is slipping from pure monotheism rather than being thoroughly polytheistic. We learned that the many epithets for God in the Quran deftly assign dozens of domains and properties to Allah, such that the Quran's deity is high and distant, but at the same time near and present in the myriad phenomena of the world around us. And just now we've learned about how the Quran describes Jinn, once a caste of Arabian spirits of caves, mountains, storms and wadis, as spirits created by the Abrahamic God, one of whom rebelled and was cast down. Now that we have a decent sense of the Quran's Arabian origins, let's take a long look at its Abrahamic origins, beginning appropriately with the way that it tells the story of Adam and Eve. As scholar Maria de Cacay it has long been observed that the Quran assumes its original audience's familiarity with biblical narratives. In other words, when Muhammad first recited the surahs of the Quran to Khadijah Ali, Abu Bakr Zayd and other Meccans, his listeners must have had an overall familiarity with the major figures of the Tanakh and the New Testament. But how was the Prophet Muhammad familiar with biblical narratives? Did the Arabs of the Hijaz have access to Arabic translations of the Old Testament or the New Testament? Could Muhammad have read the Bible or heard it recited at length? In order to answer these questions, we're going to need to take a good long look at the great many Quranic verses dealing with biblical figures, once again beginning with Adam and Eve. As we heard a moment ago, the Quran variously retells the story of Adam and Eve. Eve. Let's hear the Quran's basic story about Adam and Eve. This is from Surat al Araf, the seventh surah. In a fairly long quote from the Penguin NJ Dawood translation, God said, and you, Adam, dwell with your wife in paradise and eat of any fruit you please, but never approach this tree, or you shall both become wrongdoers. But Satan tempted them so that he might reveal to them their shameful parts which they had never seen before. And he said, you, Lord, has forbidden you both to approach this tree, only to prevent you from becoming angels or immortals. Then Satan swore to them that he would give them friendly counsel. Thus did he cunningly seduce them. And when they had eaten of the tree, their shame became visible to them them. And they both hastened to cover themselves with the leaves of the garden. Their Lord called out to them, saying, did I not forbid you both to approach that tree and say to you that Satan was your veritable foe? They replied, lord, we have wronged our own souls. Pardon us and have mercy on us, or we shall surely be among the lost. God said, get you down hence, and may your descendants be adversaries to one another. The earth will for a certain term provide your dwelling and your comforts. There you shall live, and there you shall die, and thence shall you be raised to life. Here we see the Christian story of Adam, Eve and Satan in the Garden of Eden, though just a moment before in the same surah, Satan is called Iblis. I say Christian story because Satan is not in Genesis. And the tale of a jealous fallen angel duping Adam and Eve was a later piece of exegesis rather than anything original to the Tanakh. Anyway, the Quran retells the Christian story of Adam and Eve that had become standard by the 7th century, telling us that the first two humans screwed up big time. Interestingly, though, the Quran and Islam after it do not share the Augustinian doctrine of original sin. To the Quran, Adam and Eve were Hanifs. Their default and the default of all humanity was a primordial awareness of the sovereignty of God and the signs of the world. As evidence for this God, the Quran states, so profit as a man of pure faith. Stand firm and true in your devotion to the religion. This is the natural disposition God instilled in mankind. There is no altering God's creation, and this is the right religion, though most people do not realize it. The natural disposition here, which the Harper one study Koran translates as primordial nature, is once again an inbuilt devotion to the Abrahamic God. The Augustinian doctrine of original sin teaches us that God's creation of humanity was altered permanently by Adam and Eve's mistake. The Quran, though, teaches that humanity's default state is a ready awareness of God's sovereignty and that this default created state is unalterable. Later Islamic commentators accordingly affirmed that when children died, they died in possession of their natural position or primordial nature, and they were thus sent to heaven uncorrupted by the false creeds of later periods of history. The question arises then, that if humanity were indeed created with an inborn antediluvian monotheism, if each human being innately understands that there is One God who created the world and who oversees it. Then why is the world filled with such a bustling plurality of creeds and religions? The Qur' an's answer to this question is that history is cyclical. Humanity makes covenants with God as Adam and Eve did, but humanity stumbles away from those covenants and needs periodic reminders of God's sovereignty. These reminders in the past have come in the form of biblical prophets. The Quran says that Adam, Noah, then Abraham, and then Moses and others up until Muhammad himself, were all put on earth to compel humankind to return to the original monotheistic reverence with which they were naturally born. To repeat, the Quran sees biblical prophets as a series of recurring reminders sent to earth to admonish and nudge humanity back toward the hardwired righteousness with which we are all born. The corollary of the Quran's basic understanding of human history is that the book's view of human nature is essentially an optimistic and hopeful one. The Quran then teaches us that humanity has an inbuilt moral compass pointed toward God, and that prophets arrive at certain junctures of sacred history to remind us of what we already innately understand. There are hundreds of references to biblical prophets in the Quran. Biblical prophets in the Quran are exemplary and often tragic figures, brave but but unheeded, righteous but ignored. In scholar Robert Tatulli's words in the Qur', an, the tales of biblical prophets are marked by adversity, opposition and hardship that each prophet must be able to resist, trusting in his final victory willed by God. Torment or conflict and escape from danger, often involving a flight of some sort, is repeatedly presented as the primary adversaries suffered by the prophets. Biblical prophets often appear in the Quran in enumerated lists as amassed evidence that what the Quran is teaching has already been taught before. The earliest of these fraught figures is Noah. Noah's story appears most lengthily in the quran in its 26th surah. Let's hear how the Quran recounts what happened to Noah in the Harper 1 study Quran. The people of Noah denied the messengers when their brother Noah said unto them, will you not be reverent? Truly I am a trustworthy messenger unto you, so reverence God and obey me, and I ask not of you any reward for it. My reward lies only with the Lord of the worlds. So reverence God and obey me. They said, shall we believe in you when the lowliest follow you? Noah said, what knowledge have I of what they used to do Their reckoning is only by my Lord were You but aware and I shall not drive away the believers. I am but a clear warner. They said, truly, if you cease not, O Noah, you shall indeed be among the stoned. He said, my Lord, verily my people have denied me. So decide between me and them and deliver me and the believers who are with me. So we delivered him and those who were with him in the full laden ark. Then afterwards we drowned those who remained. There are dozens of references to Noah in the Quran, like this one and one other juncture where his story is recounted at length in which one of Noah's sons refuses to board the ark and he drowns as a result. The story of Noah in the Quran follows the story told in Genesis chapters six through nine. The story of Noah in the Quran also takes some different directions. Pervasively in the Quran, Noah is a scorned prophet, a figure who even as he builds the ark, endures the laughter and jeers of skeptical passerby. In the Bible, by contrast, Noah is a more cryptic figure. He is not a prophet. He never tells anyone to repent. He's told to build the boat and he builds it. His son doesn't drown due to a refusal to board the ark. Instead, Ham sees Noah drunk and naked and Noah curses Ham to be the patriarch of the enslaved Canaanites. The Quran's Noah is a more self conscious agent of righteousness, telling his countrymen to repent and enduring their skepticism. The Bible's Noah is more ambiguous, creating the ark due to divine mandate, but then getting plastered and cursing one of his sons for checking in on him. There are often differences like this between biblical prophets in the Quran and biblical prophets in the Bible Bible. Let's talk about why these differences exist and listen carefully here. By the way, this will be key to understanding the Quran's complex relationship with the Bible. There is no historical evidence that Arabic translations of the Bible existed in the early 600s when the Quran first emerged. To be clear, there were plenty of Arabic speaking Jews and Christians and Muhammad would have known some of them. Them the Jewish gentility of Yethrib and Chaibar and elsewhere would have known the liturgical and scholarly languages of Hebrew and Aramaic. Some of the Christian communities like Nestorians who had fled Byzantine persecutions in the mid-400s would have still used some of the New Testament's original Greek. However, though sacred languages may have been familiar to the Arabic speaking Jews and Christians of the Hijaz and the and though they may have had liturgical readings of Scriptures in their original languages, we have no evidence that there was an Arabic Bible no standard Arabic rendering of either the Old or New Testament. This meant, as we'll see in the remainder of this episode, that Arabs like Muhammad and probably even Jews and Christians themselves encountered biblical figures as folkloric archetypes, protagonists of both biblical and non biblical story cycles like the one we just heard about Noah. Noah in the Quran is the boat guy, just like in the Bible. But Noah has different properties too. He is a Hanif preaching primordial righteousness to any who will listen and many who will not. The Quran was produced in a culture in which biblical figures and truisms were all over, but the Bible itself was not. And so the Quran often repurposes biblical patriarchs in its own distinctive ways. After Noah, in the Quranic lineage of prophets, comes Abraham himself. Abraham, as we learned in prior episodes, was heavily associated with Mecca. Growing up in the city when Muhammad was a boy, Muhammad would have seen the small hills, Safa and Marwa mounds that according to tradition, Abraham's concubine Hagar ran back and forth between searching for water for her son Ismail. Muhammad would have seen the Zamzam well, which according to local tradition, God had created to provide water to Hagar and Ismail. And of course Muhammad knew all about the Kaaba, that cube shaped shaped shrine with an appendant porch that the locals said had been constructed by Abraham. In a way, just as the ancient Greek pilgrimage site of Delphi honored Apollo, Mecca's principal figure seems to have been Abraham. His was the main shrine that you came to see in the year 600. There were many gods in Mecca, but Abraham was associated with the God who was inexorably due to the the forward momentum of history gaining ground. Let's talk about Abraham in the Quran. Now his name appears 70 times. The 14th Surah is named after him. Abraham in the Bible is born 10 generations after Noah, who was born nine generations after Adam. After the Old Testament, God's first Judgment Day, the biblical flood, Noah renewed a covenant with God. But 10 more generations passed and humanity's ever faltering morality required the coming of another prophet and a new covenant. That new prophet was Abraham, born 19 long generations after the creation of humanity. Although Abraham came along quite a while after Noah, both the New Testament and the Qur' an emphasize Abraham as an especially ancient patriarch. Paul's Epistle to the Romans describes how there are adherents to the law, but also those who share the faith of Abraham in the presence of God, in whom he believed. The New Testament book of Romans there points out that Abraham lived before Moses and thus before the many commandments of Mosaic law, but also that Abraham was still a righteous person who shared a covenant with God. This distinction that Abraham was virtuous and devout before the Torah ever came to be, was not lost on the Quran. The Quran exclaims people of the Book. Why do you argue about Abraham when the Torah and the Gospels were not revealed until after his time? Do you not understand? Abraham was neither a Jew nor a Christian. He was upright and devoted to God, never an idolater, and the people who are closest to him are those who follow his ways. The Arabic original for he was upright and devoted to God is that Abraham was the Hanifan Muslim or a Hanif who submitted. Or more simply, that Abraham was a Muslim. To some ears this might be an incendiary statement. But the point that the Quran makes here is that before, during and after the entire Bible was written, there were always those of us humans who used our inbuilt capacities to understand the singularity and righteousness of God. And that Abraham was one of these. There are four sustained narratives about Abraham in the Quran and they follow the Quran's general depiction of prophets as embattled figures, resolute but scorned by indifferent worlds. The first Quranic story builds on a non biblical Jewish tradition about Abraham's father owning an idol shop. Abraham in the Quran, scornful of his father's worship of idols, has an epiphany. Abraham first worships a star and then the moon and then the sun. But he sees that all of these celestial bodies set and Abraham wants to worship something more permanent. Once Abraham vows to worship God, he encounters in his own people many errant skeptics, Mushrikun, who mistakenly associate other deities with the one true God. That's the first long story about Abraham in the Quran. The second sustained narrative about Abraham in the Quran builds on the first. Again, Abraham tells his father and his contemporaries not to worship idols. But this time Abraham breaks all of the idols into pieces except for one. The idol worshippers are furious and they plan to burn Abraham. But God protects Abraham and vows retribution against his assailants. These Quranic stories about Abraham are again non biblical, but they had roots in Jewish exegesis. In a town like Mecca so focused on Abraham, many stories about the patriarch, including those from Jewish traditions, would have been in circulation. Different stories about Abraham, stories that are actually told in the Bible, also make their way into the Quran, just as he does in the Bible. In the Quran, Abraham expresses incredulity toward angelic visitors when he hears that his wife Sarah will soon bear him a son. And then Abraham pleads with the angels to have mercy on the city of Sodom, where Abraham's nephew Lot lives. And just as he does in the Bible, in the Quran, Abraham is compelled to sacrifice his son, though the Quran never says which son. The Quranic version of this famous moment in the Bible is offered in terse, brisk verses that have some significant differences with what we read in Genesis. Here's the Abraham sacrificing a son story as it appears in the 37th Surah of the Quran in the Penguin Tarif Khalidi. When the son was old enough to accompany him, he said, my son, I saw in a dream that I was sacrificing you, so reflect and give me your opinion. The boy said, father, do as you are commanded and you shall find me, God willing, steadfast. When both submitted to the will of God, he bent his head down and on its side, and God called out to him, O Abraham, you have made your vision come true. Thus does God reward the righteous. That was indeed a conspicuous ordeal. Israel and God ransomed him with a mighty sacrifice and conferred honor upon him among later generations. Peace be upon Abraham. Thus does God reward the righteous. The story is more fatalistic and less dramatic than the one told in the Book of Genesis. Abraham in the Quran has a dream about the mandated sacrifice. His son expresses willingness. Again, which son is to be sacrificed is not specified in the Quran. And the normal Muslim interpretation is that the son to be sacrificed is Ismail, the biblical Ishmael, rather than Isaac. Anyway, in the Quran, Abraham prepares to do his duty and God appears and calls it off. Afterward, Abraham is praised for his virtue and devoutness. In Genesis, there is no dream and no consent from Isaac. And famously, the journey to Mount Moriah takes three days, over the course of which poor Isaac has no idea about what's about to happen. There are differences then between the biblical and Quranic narratives of Abraham sacrificing his son and about Abraham's youth. The Quran offers Abraham's life selectively, collectively emphasizing him as a righteous prophet and a proto Muslim. Rather than offering the Bible's full biography. And generally, in comparing the Quran to the Book of Genesis, it's important to remember that we're setting an apple alongside an orange. The Book of Genesis is an extended third person omniscient narrative. Presented in chronological order. The Quran is an oration made of both verse and prose. It scatters prophetic elements of Abraham's life into multiple surahs, citing well known information about Abraham that would have been familiar to late antique Arabs of the Hijaz. The Bible tells Abraham's story. The Quran cites elements of this story for rhetorical purposes, assuming that you're familiar with it and using the old tale to emphasize that that righteous monotheists have been out there since way back before the Israelites crossed the river into Israel. So having looked at the stories of Adam, Eve, Noah and Abraham in the Quran, we've learned about how the Quran retells parts of the Bible's patriarchal sagas. Sometimes the Quran introduces narrative elements not present in the Bible, such as Noah's son drowning or Abraham smashing his father's idols. At other times, the Quran's narratives of patriarchs and prophets are pretty closely aligned with relevant passages in the Bible. Most frequently of all though, the Quran briefly references a biblical episode in order to make a point, assuming that its audience is sufficiently grounded in biblical knowledge to understand that point. Now that we've gone through the most foundational of the biblical patriarchs in the Quran, let's move forward through a few more and explore what the Surahs have to say about Moses, Jonah and Job. Moses Moses is another frequent presence in the the champion of the Israelites, recipient of the Commandments, ultimate lawgiver of the twelve tribes and the anchor of the Pentateuch after Exodus. In the Bible, Moses most frequent role is recurrently convincing God not to smash the Israelites after they've committed this or that transgression. Other biblical patriarchs come along earlier in the Torah, but it is Moses who receives the most page space, arriving at the Israelite hour of greatest need down in Egypt, guiding them back home and then on the banks of the Jordan, offering the entire book of Deuteronomy as a retirement speech before his successor Joshua and the subsequent Judges lead the Israelites into a bloody military conquest of Canaan. Moses story in the Bible is a long one and the Quran doesn't tell the entire thing. The Quran references Moses often as one of the many Hanifs who submitted to God and a prophet like many biblical prophets who was doubted in his own time. The Quran recounts how Moses was born at a dire juncture when the Egyptian pharaoh had resolved to kill the sons of the Israelites. The Quran tells of how Moses received the tablets on which the Commandments were inscribed. But more than any other biblical stories about Moses, the Quran focuses on on two the first is Moses confrontation with the Egyptian pharaoh. The second is the infamous golden calf episode. Both of these, as with the Quran's preferred stories about other biblical prophets show Moses as an embattled figure striving to promulgate the basic truths about God in an iniquitous and backsliding world. The clash between Moses and the Pharaoh is a central episode in both the book of Exodus as well as the Quran. In Exodus, the confrontation takes place in a sort of sorcery contest in which Moses and his brother Aaron turn Moses staff into a snake, then turn the Nile to blood, then summon plagues of frogs, gnats, flies, boils, thunder, locusts and darkness until Moses and Aaron pray for the killing of all of the firstborn children of Egypt. The narrative, perhaps 1200 years old when Muhammad was growing up, still had an enduring power with its story of low born virtuous commoners confronting the high born heathens and ultimately winning out. In the Quran, as with references to other prophets, the story of Moses appears in snippets in many different surahs brought up to make various points. Moses is also however, the subject of an extremely long narrative by Quranic standards, a narrative narrative of over 50 verses in Surat Al Araf. And just to be clear, by the way, I am now going to tell you how Moses is presented in the Quran rather than the Bible. In this lengthy passage in the Quran, Moses appears in the court of the Egyptian Pharaoh and he tells the Pharaoh, I am a messenger from the Lord of all the worlds duty bound to say nothing about God but the truth. Truth. And I have brought you a clear sign from your Lord. Let the children of Israel go with me. Moses then in the same scene, tosses his staff onto the ground and it changes into a snake and then he changes his own hand to a different color. The casting of the staff in the Quran leads to a much shorter version of the Bible's sorcery competition. The Pharaoh's sorcerers can't transform a staff and though they immediately admit that Moses God must be real, the Pharaoh chastens them, vowing to mutilate and kill his turncoat magicians. Then the Pharaoh's wrath deepens. As in the Bible, the Pharaoh vows to murder all male Israelite children. What follows in the Quran is a shortened version of the tale of Exodus narrated by God himself. God recollects sending plagues of locusts, lice, frogs and blood down among the Egyptians, emphasizing that all of these were intended as clear signs. The Egyptians, however, blamed each subsequent disaster on the Israelites rather than understanding them as signs until eventually God drowned many Egyptians in the sea. God then continues the story of the Exodus in the Quran using the royal we, we took the children of Israel across the sea. But when they came upon a people who worshipped idols, they said, moses, make a God for us like theirs. Thus begins the second major story about Moses in the Quran, the tale of the Commandments and the golden calf. As the Israelites began their fateful hankering for false idols in this same sequence in Surat al Araf, the seventh Surah of the Quran. Subsequently, Moses spent 40 nights in isolation. Moses asked God to show himself, and rather than appearing as a burning bush, God caused a mountain to crumble in order to demonstrate his presence to Moses. God then recollects in the we inscribed everything for him him in the tablets which taught and explained everything, saying hold on to them firmly and urge your people to hold fast to their excellent teachings. I will show you the end of those who rebel. And while Moses was busily receiving the commandments of God on the mountain, the Israelites down on the flat land had begun behaving very badly. They were worshipping, the Quran says, a mere shape that made sounds like a cow, a calf made from their jewelry. Upon Moses return, he chastised the Israelites, including his brother Aaron, whom he'd left to watch over them, and the Israelites repented. Moses then hefted the tablets containing the Commandments, and he selected 70 representatives to help lead them and prayed for mercy from God. More than 50 verses of the Quran's seventh Surah in the sequence you've just heard retell the story told in the early chapters of Exodus. They follow Exodus fairly closely with minor differences. Other portions of the Quran retell or cite parts of Moses long story, emphasizing different parts of it for various reasons, including Moses confrontation with the Pharaoh, the golden calf episode and its aftermath, and the drowning of the Egyptians. Elsewhere, the Quran tells of how Moses urged his reluctant people to cross the river into Canaan, even though they feared the warlike tribes who lived there. In all of these cases, Moses in the Qur' an is a persistent, beleaguered figure, never at rest and required again and again to prove the sovereignty of God to dubious Egyptians and backsliding Israelites alike. He is perhaps at his most vulnerable in a brief appearance when he asks the my people, why do you hurt me when you know that I am sent to you by God? Here, Moses, like the other biblical prophets in the Quran, suffers from a basic and flabbergasting paradox. After showing Egyptians and Israelites palpable proof of God's presence, he is baffled to find again and again scorn and resistance from Noah, onward, then. The long line of biblical prophets in the Quran are hampered and flummoxed by historical epics that are not yet ready for them. While Moses gets a considerable amount of page space in the Quran, so too do two final figures from the Old Testament, and these are Job and Jonah. Let's start with Job. The Book of Job is one of the most distinctive and searing texts in the Bible, exploring the theme of the problem of evil more than any other piece of canonized scripture. At over 12,000 words and in a series of dramatic dialogues, the Bible's Book of Job shows the titular character stretched to the limits of what any person can be expected to endure. At the Book of Job's end, as we learned a hundred episodes ago, the protagonist's questions are never answered, with Job listening to God's monologue about how God beat the behemoth and Leviathan. And then, in the final verses, Job receiving replacement children and livestock for the ones that God has destroyed. Job, during the life of Muhammad, was another figure from Judaism known in Mecca. Although the Quran's presentation of Job is somewhat shorter and simpler than the Bible's, Here are the Quran's two longest passages about Job in the Penguin Dawood and tell of our servant Job. He called out to his Lord, saying, satan has afflicted me with anguish and torment. Stamp your feet on the ground. Here is a cool spring for you to wash in and to drink from. We restored him his household and as many more with them, a blessing from ourself and an admonition to those that are of good sense possessed. We found him a steadfast, a good and penitent man. That's the first one. The next one. And tell of Job how he called on his Lord, saying, I am sorely afflicted and of all those that show mercy, you are the most merciful. We answered his prayer and relieved his affliction. We restored to him his family and as many more with them, a blessing from ourself and an admonition to the devout. Those are the Quran stories about Job. We should always remember that Satan is not in the Old Testament, though Christianity and Islam have retrojected him there. The Old Testament tale of Job is a more complicated one, with an ambiguous figure called the Adversary challenging God to test Job and then God hurting Job and his family as a result of the bet. Until at the apex of the Book of Job in the Bible, God essentially tells Job to shut up. The Quranic version of the story of Job is in some ways morally tidier. It is Satan through and through who hurt hurts Job and his family in the Quran. And when goodly Job asks God for help, God helps. The Quranic tale of Job is the satisfying story of a pious person rewarded, based as it likely was on perhaps a simpler and more folkloric version of Job's story current in monotheistic circles in 7th century Arabia. Just as the Quran tells the story of the Book of Job in a truncated fashion and with important variation, the Quran also offers the tale of the Book of Jonah. The Book of Jonah is one of the more optimistic narratives in the Old Testament. In the Bible's Book of Jonah, a reluctant prophet from Samaria receives a message from God that he has to go all the way to Nineveh in Assyria, trying to duck out of his duty, Jonah hops on a ship. But when the ship is blustered by gales, Jonah, and realizing that he has incurred divine wrath and not wanting to get all the sailors on board killed, jumps overboard, gets swallowed by a whale and spends three days and nights there, and then gets puked back up on shore. Afterward, Jonah heads to Nineveh. Jonah tells the Ninevites to repent. They do. 120,000 ninevites are saved. Jonah, still sullen and surly, still isn't happy about having had to go all the way to Mesopotamia. But God patiently keeps explaining to Jonah why Jonah had to go. And that's it. That's the biblical version of the Book of Jonah, a lovely perhaps later second Temple period book in which, wonder of wonders, good gracious people actually listen to an Abrahamic prophet and things turn out alright. The Quran includes anecdotes about Jonah, though not his entire story, reflecting on how the Ninevites repented in the Book of Jonah narrative surat Yunus, the 10th surah of the Quran, named after Jonah. If only a single town had believed and benefited from its belief. Only Jonah's people did so, and when they believed, we relieved them of the punishment of disgrace in the life of this world and let them enjoy life. It's a nice verse celebrating one of the more joyful junctures of the Bible's prophetic books. A different Surah, although very quickly, retells the entire book of Jonah with reasonable accuracy. Here's the Quran's summation of Jonah in the Penguin Tariff Halidi translation of what are in the original Arabic Short, rich lines of Jonah too was a messenger. Remember when he fled on a laden ship, he cast lots and was bested. A great fish swallowed him. He was to blame. Had he not been one who glorified God, he would have stayed in its belly till the day that mankind is resurrected. We cast him out into the wilderness and we caused to sprout over him a tree of gourd and then sent him to a hundred thousand or more they believed. So we granted them enjoyment of life. That narrative lines up quite closely with the book of Jonah. Although the shade tree in the Old Testament doesn't arise until after the Ninevites are saved. So in summation we have just as many people have explored the way that the Quran cites and adapts the Old Testament's stories of the patriarchs. At a general level, the Quran cites each patriarch's story as a tale of a pre Islamic Muslim sent to earth to remind humanity to return to God. Biblical prophets in the Quran are Jonah aside, steadfast, willing vessels for divine messages. Though from Noah enduring the scorn of his community onward, the Quran's gaggle of prophets do not have easy lives. Compelled by divine will on one side and disdained by their contemporaries on the other, prophets in the Quran also like Jonah, suffer personal crises in which the tribulations of their lives lead them to feel exhaustion and doubt. So now that we've taken a very specific look at the Quran's Abrahamic roots in the Old Testament, let's look at the Quran's treatment of some other biblical figures. Just as Jonah, Jonah, Job, Moses, Abraham, Noah, Adam and Eve appear to have been familiar figures to the masses of Mecca around 600 CE, so too were the major figures of the New Testament. More than anyone in the New Testament, John the Baptist, the Virgin Mary and Jesus Christ appear frequently in the pages of the Quran. So as we come to our final hour or so of content on the Quran, let's consider what the book has to say about the most iconic figures of Christianity. John the Baptist, that insect munching desert hermit who predicts the coming of Jesus in the New Testament, shows up a few times in the Quran. The Quran retells the biblical story of John the Baptist's early life, emphasizing that Zechariah in the Quran was an old man without any kids and that Zechariah's wife Elizabeth, who is unnamed in the Quran, was unable to have any children. Old Zechariah in the Quran prays for a child, humbly telling God that even though his hair is gray and his wife is barren, he still wants a child. To further the lineage of Jacob. And God promises the elderly pair a child, telling Zechariah that he will indeed have a son. That this son's name will be Yahya, the Arabic form of the Aramaic name Yohanan or John. Interestingly, in the Quran, God says that we have chosen this name for no one before him. This Quranic detail is not in the Bible and must have come from an extra biblical narrative about John the Baptist. Current in the Hijaz by the seventh century, the Quran retells the Gospel of Luke's tale of John the Baptist's father Zechariah being skeptical about the impending miraculous birth and also of how God struck Zechariah mute when Zechariah asked for a confirmation of the miracle to come. And again paralleling the New Testament, the Quran recounts how John the Baptist was born with a a firm moral compass and showed great promise as a young person. And that's actually all the Quran has to say about Yahya or John. The book does not retell the Bible's famous narrative of how John the Baptist was beheaded at the birthday party of the tetrarch Herod and Tippis. Leaving off to turn to the subject of Maryam or the Virgin Mary. Maryam and Isa, or Mary and Jesus are revered figures throughout the Quran. And but for a few very important sticking points, the Quran follows New Testament teachings about this pair. Let's begin with Mary. Mary is actually mentioned more times in the Quran than she is in the Bible, and her life is drawn out more extensively in the Quran, as we've learned in prior episodes. Although the New Testament treats Mary pretty briefly, she was later in apocryphal books, especially the Proto Gospel of James and the Gospel of Pseudo Matthew, given an extensive backstory. Without getting into a lot of details, it can simply be said that by the year 600, Mary was a more revered figure in Christianity than she had been when the New Testament was actually being written. And the Quran respects her and tells her story in a way consistent with general Christian truisms current to the early 7th century. Earlier Christian literature about Mary actually began by assigning Mary herself a virgin birth from her mother Anna, and telling of how Mary grew up in the Jerusalem Temple, leading an incomparably pious life there from age three onward. The Qur' an also engages with Mary's early life. In the Qur', an, we first meet Mary as the daughter of a man named Imran, after whom the third Surah of the Quran is named. Mary, the Quran says, was pledged to God from birth and she was a signal from God, as late antique Christian apocryphal texts taught. The Quran describes how Mary was raised in the temple and given sacred food and how she was such a special child that her guardians didn't know who would care for her. Then comes the story of Mary's miraculous pregnancy. Surat Maryam, or the Surah of Mary, tells of the immaculate conception of Jesus, a narrative which follows on the heels of the miraculous birth of John the Baptist. Here's the story of Mary's annunciation and pregnancy as it's told in the Qur'. An. This is the Harper one Study Qur' an translation and remember Mary in the book when she withdrew from her family to an Easter egg place and she veiled herself from them, Then we sent unto her our spirit and it assumed for her the likeness of a perfect man. She said, I seek refuge from thee and the compassionate if you are reverent. He said, I am but a messenger of thy Lord to bestow upon thee a pure boy. She said, how shall I have a boy when no man has touched me, nor have I been unchaste. He said, thus it shall be. The Lord says, it is easy for me and it is thus that we might make him a sign unto mankind and a mercy from us. And it is a matter decreed. So she conceived him and withdrew to a place far off. Poor Mary in the Koran has no husband and no Bethlehem manger as in the Gospel of Luke, in the Quran, Mary gives birth in the wilderness, clinging to a palm tree. Though a divine voice promises her that a stream at her feet will provide her water and that shaking the aforementioned palm tree will provide her with a bounty of fresh dates whenever she needs them. And this brings us to the subject of Jesus and his birth in the Quran. As we begin to explore the Quranic stories of Jesus nativity, it's important to remember something. Just as apocryphal narratives about the Virgin Mary had proliferated by the year 600, by the time Muhammad lived, a great many non biblical narratives about Jesus had also grown popular. During late antiquity. An entire genre of what we might call Christian devotional fiction had arisen by about 600 that generally gets called Infancy Gospels, including the Infancy Gospel of Thomas, the Proto Gospel of James, the Gospel of Pseudo, Matthew and more. These texts offered long accounts of Jesus earliest years, his childhood and adolescence, many of which are very endearing and well written and have cute baby Jesus scenes, though again they're non canonical. The Quran as it tells Jesus story in various surahs and makes use of this outer halo of stories about Christ in addition to the narratives actually canonized in the gospels. In an appealing scene in the Quran The Virgin Mary returns to her people after giving birth to Jesus. Mary's family sees that she's had a baby out of wedlock and chastening her, they tell her that her parents were good people, implying that she's a fallen woman. Mary then points to the baby Jesus who miraculously speaks explaining to I am a servant of God, he has granted me the scripture, made me a prophet, made me blessed wherever I may be. He commanded me to pray, to give alms as long as I live, to cherish my mother. He did not make me domineering or graceless. Peace was on me the day I was born and will be on me the day I die and the day I am raised to life again. The courteous, well spoken infant we might imagine silenced Mary's family's harsh words against her. And of Mary's later life, the Quran says nothing. Leaving off with this scene of baby Jesus vindicating his mother from charges of indecency and speaking of Isa or Jesus, let's shift our focus to Jesus himself in the Quran for a while. Jesus is revered in the Quran as a holy prophet born of a virgin, being a servant of God and given a miraculous birth. In the verses of the Quran related to Jesus, Jesus leads a righteous life life serving as one of God's periodic reminders to return to submission to the original simple monotheism of the biblical Abraham. Hence the fact that Jesus disciples in the Quran are called Muslim or submitters or Muslims. The language here has some weight from later theological history, but the basic message that Jesus disciples agree to submit to God is straightforward and uncontentious. And likewise, much of what the Quran has to say about Jesus is in line with particularly Pauline theology in the Bible. For instance, Jesus says in the third surah of the Quran, I will heal the blind and the leper and bring the dead back to life With God's permission. I will tell you what you may eat and what you may store up in your houses. I have come to confirm the truth of the Torah which preceded me and to make some things lawful to you which used to be forbidden. The verses there share the general spirit of the Gospels and especially the Pauline epistles. Jesus performs evidentiary miracles and updates the old laws of Moses, guiding the Israelites and others back toward a simpler, more ecumenical religion. While many of the Quran's teachings about Jesus are entirely in line with Christian teachings about Jesus, many are definitely not. Most notably, the Quran states that the Messiah, Jesus son of Mary, was nothing more than a messenger of God, God's word directed to Mary and a spirit from him. Him. So believe in God and his messengers and do not speak of a trinity. Stop this. That is better for you. God is only one God. He is far above having a son. Everything in the heavens and earth belongs to him and he is the best one to trust. As we heard earlier, although Jesus in the Quran was a pure boy sent from God via Immaculate Conception, the book also asserts that Jesus was not the Son of God. The Quran emphasizes that it would not befit God to have a child. He is far above that. When he decrees something, he says only be. And it is while I'm sure you get the point, just to offer one more verse on the subject in the Quran, God asks Jesus whether Jesus ever asked his disciples to quote, take me and my mother as two gods alongside God. And Jesus replies that he never said this. Let's talk for a moment about the Quran's denial of the divinity of Jesus. Muhammad likely knew a number of different kinds of Christians. As mentioned earlier, these would have included Syriac Christians, Melkites, Jacobites and Nestorians, along with Copts and Armenian and Ethiopian Christians as well. Arabia by the year 500 was also home to Jewish Christian sects like the Nazarenes, Ebionites and Alcocites, who, from what little we know about them, were Jewish groups that embraced Jesus as a messiah but held to Mosaic laws in different ways and sometimes practiced cultic purity rituals. For all of these groups, especially Monophysites and other Christian refugees exiled from the Byzantine Empire due to their specific creeds, the question of Christology was a riddle half a thousand years old. The question of whether Jesus was human or a divine spirit and how much of him was human and how much divine and how his natures commingled and that kind of thing. This was the central preoccupation of late antique Christianity. The Quran, in verses like the ones you heard a moment ago, endeavors to clear up this riddle again telling its readers that Jesus was not the Son of God and by extension, taking a firm position within the long history of Christological controversies, church councils, excommunications and exiles that had been so central to Christianity's first five centuries. It's important then to understand the Quran's denial of the Trinity in context. In one sense, this denial is anti Christian polemic. But the Quran's view of Jesus as a great prophet born of immaculate conception, though nothing more, was also intended as a theological simplification, sweeping away the old paradox of trinitarian monotheism and inviting everyone, Jews and Pagan Arabs alike to revere Jesus Christ. The Quran's distinctive matronymics for Jesus show this desire in action. Christ in the Quran is called Isa Ibn Maryam and Ibn Maryam Jesus, son of Mary and son of Mary. Because while there was some disagreement about whether Jesus was the son of God, anyone who knew anything would agree that Jesus was the son of Mary. While the Qur' an quite clearly denies that Jesus is the son of God. At several points, the Quran departs from Christian doctrine in another almost equally salient way. In a word, the Quran alleges that Jesus did not die at the crucifixion. First of all, again in the Quran, Jesus is one of God's prophets and even one born of Immaculate conception. God seems to have very special plans for Jesus. The Quran explains. God said Jesus, I will take you back and raise you up to me. I will purify you of these disbelievers to the Day of Resurrection. I will make those who followed you superior to those who disbelieved. This all sounds reasonably consonant with Christian doctrine. But in the next surah we hear the following much more controversial verses in the Penguin Tariff. Khalidi Therefore the Jews, by renouncing their covenant, by blaspheming against the revelations of God, by killing prophets unjustly and claiming our hearts are sealed, rather it is God who sealed them with their blasphemy. They believe not, except a few. So also by their blasphemy and their terrible words of slander against Mary and their saying, it is we who killed the Christ Jesus, son of Mary, the messenger of God. They killed him not, nor did they crucify him, but so it was made to appear to them. Those who disputed concerning him him are in doubt over the matter. They have no knowledge thereof, but only follow conjecture. Assuredly they killed him not, but God raised him up to him, and God is almighty all wise. In other words, the Quran, the Jews, always struggling with God, slandered Mary and killed Jesus. Only they were tricked and Jesus was not killed, but instead raised up to God. These three verses have been at the heart of a lot of commentary, particularly they killed him not, nor did they crucify him, but so it was made to appear to them. Bracketing the issue of crucifixion for a moment. Surat Anisa, the fourth Surah here takes the well trod path of late antique Christian antisemitism, depicting Jews as unbudgingly impious blasphemers who killed other divine prophets and then took it upon themselves to Kill Jesus. The Gospels actually make it clear that many Jews followed and supported Jewish Jesus and his Jewish apostles. But the myth of Jews killing Jesus, perhaps Abrahamic religion's most harmful oversimplification, was commonplace in the Christian world of late antiquity and thus not original to the Quran. So let's move on to the Quran's even more arresting statement that Jesus was actually never crucified. The thing is, the notion that Jesus was not actually crucified was also commonplace in the Christian world of late antiquity. The idea that Jesus died for mankind has always been contradicted by Gospel verses indicating that Jesus death was foreordained, that he was speedily resurrected and that as a deity he didn't die. Early Christianity also had a Christological doctrine called Docetism, which taught that Christ was either a spirit that inhabited another person's body or altogether an illusion. Gnostic Nag Hammadi texts that we've looked at in our program, like the Second Discourse of the Great Seth and the Revelation of Peter, show Jesus laughing at his own crucifixion. The Quranic verse that tells us they killed him not, nor did they crucify him, but so it was made to appear to them, is perfectly in line with a number of surviving Gnostic Christian texts that taught, as the Quran teaches, that Jesus was not crucified and did not die, but was instead lifted up to heaven by God. The Quranic verses on Jesus crucifixion then, both with their lockstep late antique Christian antisemitism and their decidic view of Jesus as uncrucified, are provocative verses for many, and they always have been. In the context of the early seventh century, however, the notions that Jews killed Jesus and simultaneously what we might call crucifixion denial, these were again common ideas in Christianity and not original to the Quran. The Quran then in summation, reveres Jesus as one of God's prophets, but not as the Son of God. Mary and Jesus are given very high esteem in the Quran, though no more so than Abraham and Moses. The Quran urges believers to we believe in God and in what was sent down to us, and what was sent down to Abraham, Ishmael, Isaac, Jacob and the tribes, and what was given to Moses, Jesus and all the prophets by their Lord. We make no distinction between any of them here. Jesus is a face in the crowd, albeit a very distinguished crowd, but nonetheless a crowd of what the Quran considers equals. And this crowd of course included the Prophet Muhammad himself. As Jesus is purported to have said in the Children of Israel, I am sent to you by God, confirming the Torah that came before me and bringing good news of a messenger to follow me, whose name will be Ahmad. The name Ahmad there, just to be clear, is a truncation of Muhammad. So what can we take away from the Quran's repurposing of the foremost figures of the New Testament? First and foremost, it's important to remember that nearly everything the Quran says about John, Mary and Jesus had been said before in the various religious movements of late anti antiquity. Mani, the prophet of Manichaeism, had also seen Christianity as a lead up to a final syncretic religion. 300 years before the birth of Islam, Gnosticism had seen Jesus sometimes as a laughing ethereal spirit and sometimes as scarcely a theological presence at all. In marked contrast to the appealing figure in the canonical gospels, the Christian Quran's presentation of Jesus as an inspired human prophet is quite close to that of Unitarianism, a Christian denomination today 500 years old. And in the 600 years that elapsed between the death of Jesus and the death of Muhammad, it's reasonable to assume that many different denominations and individuals embraced the tragic human Jesus of the Gospel of Mark as well as the deific prolix Jesus of the Gospel of John and everything in between. As we learned from 40 hours of shows on late antiquity, between 200 and 700 CE, Christians and pagans were neighbors, colleagues and friends. Christianity was never just one thing and new denominations and mixtures of denominations braided together as Rome fell and the medieval period rose. Historian Peter Brown, studying Western European history during the seventh century, described micro Christendoms ceding Britain and elsewhere, theological climates contingent upon the communities that had settled there, the bundles of scriptures or the lack thereof that they happened to possess, the individual predilections of their theological leaders and the regional paganisms rooted there as well. The Quran's views on Christianity are of course out of step with those of Catholic and Protestant teachings today. But in the context of 7th century Arabia they were drawn from a deep vibrant well of earlier theology. And within them there is a spirit of reform, compromise and theological optimization far more precedented and culturally self aware than is commonly understood outside of the Islamic world. There is a wonderful story about Jesus in one of Christianity's non canonical gospels. It's quite a short story set at the beginning of a text from the 400s or 500s that survives in Syriac and Latin manuscripts. Here's that when this child Jesus was five years old, he was playing by the ford of a stream and he gathered the flowing waters into pools and made them instantly pure. These things he ordered simply by speaking a word. He then made some soft mud and fashioned 12 sparrows from it. It was the Sabbath when he did this. This apocryphal story has a small tie to the canonical gospels. Matthew and Luke both quote Jesus as saying that not even a single sparrow will ever be forgotten by God. But in the actual Bible, five year old Jesus never kneels at a stream bank and creates sparrows out of mud. He does in the Quran, though. Jesus says in the I will make the shape of a bird for you out of clay, then breathe life into it and with God's permission it will become a real bird. It is not a very crucial moment in the Quran, just a quick mention of something that Jesus did, an anecdote that had perhaps made it down to Mecca by means of Syriac Christian traditions. On the subject of whether or not young Jesus knelt by a stream and breathed life into sparrows, neither Christianity nor Islam has thought it fit to engage in much debate. Islam, as we learned at the outset of this season, has often termed the period of history before the Prophet Muhammad al jahiliyya, generally a negative blanket term for the world not yet illuminated by Islam. We we've learned in this program, however, that the Quran itself isn't so dismissive of what came before Muhammad. The Quran sees the history of the earlier Abrahamic religions, al Adiyan, al Ibrahimiyya, as filled with a sequence of great prophets who for certain epochs actually managed to set their adherents on the right path. The Quran sees humanity as forgetful rather than innately transgressive, a species that keeps needing to be nudged back again and again to the monotheism of Adam, who has the benefit of a patient and forgiving God, who again and again provides prophets to undertake the nudging. The Quran itself does not paint Islamic prehistory as a grimy and misbegotten epic of kowtowing to carved idols. The book depicts human history as having been full of wondrous devoutness and humanity as being almost, but not quite there in terms of its piety, still too inclined to associating a slurry of other gods with the actual God who has been there all along. And on the subject of the Quran's frequently positive attitude toward the luminaries of yesteryear, I want to reiterate one final point about the Quran. For those of you out there who have never read a word of it, that is that the Quran is ultimately an optimistic, inspirational book. To be clear, it is also an Abrahamic scripture like the Tanakh and New Testament, with the usual anger against non believers and fearsome rhetoric either foreseeing the demise of heathens or less often actually enjoining violence against religious outgroups. Abrahamic scriptures had oscillated between forbearance and ferocity for more than a thousand years before Muhammad lived, and so it's no surprise that we find these same inconsonant elements in the pages of a book that so studiously followed the teachings of the Bible. To repeat, though, although the Quran is made of the usual Abrahamic marbling of fury and forgiveness, and although it has more than a few revelations more related to the miscellaneous quandaries of Muhammad's life than the universal circumstances of the human condition, the book also communicates a sense of wondrous positivity at the world and our lives within it as gifts from God that should be appreciated. That was the first as well as the last thing I wanted to communicate about the Quran in these three shows on the book. There's one more thing, though, and to cover that, I'm going to need to start with a story. The story involves something called senioritis. Senioritis, for those of you who haven't heard, the term is what happens to high school students during their final year before graduating. About six months out from cap and gown, some students get senioritis. The symptoms include wanderlust, academic indifference, a sense that they're basically done with high school and that it's time to chill out and rest on their laurels until graduation. I didn't get senioritis during high school. I didn't get senioritis during college either. But I did get senioritis in my final year of graduate school school. My dissertation was cooking, pretty much done. I was waiting for feedback all the time, and my committee was doing what committees do sometimes and dealing with their own lives and careers. I had some time, and I was frankly a little tired of being drilled down eight layers deep in specialist scholarship and writing grand standing endnotes that nobody was probably ever going to look at. There was something in the air. Faraway things, distant continents and epics of history were calling my name. Oxford University Press had fairly recently come out with a new translation of the Quran. I bought it and, you know, as such things go, it went up onto my bookshelves, where it stayed for a year. I'd walk by and look at that book. As I wrapped up grad school, my wife and I geared up to move. She'd landed a solid job, which was great news. And then we moved and I hopscotched between working for consulting companies and adjuncting. I'd turned 30 then, between consulting and teaching assignments, life gave me the gift of about four months. I wanted to read the Quran, but I also knew it was time to read the whole New Oxford Annotated Bible first. Because in case you haven't noticed, over the past 300 hours, I like doing things in chronological order. Order. The Tanakh, New Testament, and Deuterocanonical books took about two months. I wrote and responded to all of them. Then finally, maybe a year and a half had passed. It was time to read the Quran. We all have, I don't know, maybe 10 or 20 reading moments in our lives, moments we always remember where we were when we were reading the thing that ended up being really transformative. For whatever reason I had one of mine with the Quran. What happened was that my wife was running a half marathon, or marathon, I can't remember, and I gave her a lift to the course. Marathons always start at a viciously early hour. I've run a lot of them, and it still pisses me off every time that in addition to running a needlessly long distance, I also convince myself to abide by the ritual of getting up at three in the morning to do so. Anyway, Sidebar There I dropped my beloved off and then the dog and I drove to some nearby street to catch some sleep. It was winter January, I think, and the car was really cold. I'd brought a blanket and I got in the back with the dog, but I couldn't fall asleep. Luckily I had the Quran with me as the sun came up after the first short opening surah, I read Surat al Baqarah, or the Cow, the Quran's second and longest chapter. It felt familiar and unfamiliar all at once. I had read the Bible's 500 page stretch of prophetic books the month before, so I had an idea of what a miscellany of Abrahamic revelations was going to sound like. At the same time, though, there is a thing that Islamic studies scholars scholars call the Quranic voice. We've talked about the technical aspects of it. In earlier episodes, the Quran will turn from declarative to imperative to interrogative to exclamatory sentences, just as it alternates from the royal we to I as God speaks in the text, and as a result the revelations billow and churn on the page as you read, each verse rippling into a new one with unexpected structural changes. I read the second surah there in the back of the cold car until dawn started to break and then I rolled down the window and I didn't need a flashlight anymore because the light was coming through the bare branches of trees along the residential street where I was parked. And fittingly, maybe, I came to these verses, my very favorite, in the Qur', an, as the sun was coming up in the creation of the heavens and earth, in the alternation of night and day, in the ships that sail the seas with goods for people, in the water which God sends down from the sky to give life to the earth when it has been barren, scattering all kinds of creatures over it, in the changing of the winds and clouds that run their appointed courses between the sky and earth. There are signs in all these for those who use their minds. The Quran, I thought, doesn't see the world as some grungy preamble to heaven. The Quran doesn't share that strange Christian and Neoplatonic paradox that a majestic God would create a dismal, fallen world. To the Quran, of course, the world is fresh and gorgeous, a system of miraculous systems that suggests with every vista the presence of a kindly deity. I read that and I smiled and looked at the light from the winter daybreak falling on the soft brown and faintly ochre coat of my dog. And I had about the closest thing to a spiritual experience that a whole hardcore academic raised in a non religious household can have. You want evidence of God? The Quran asks, open your eyes and ears and breathe in the world. Then on the very next page, I read another paradigm shifting couple of verses. Here they are. God has only forbidden you to eat carrion, blood, pigs, meat and animals over which any name other than God's has been invoked. But if anyone is forced to eat such things by hunger rather than desire or excess, he commits no sin. God is most merciful and forgiving. Here again was something new. It was a thou shalt, not like all the old school ones the Abrahamic world knew. But it also left leeway for contingencies. That simultaneous dyadic structure of offering commandments and exemptions which we discussed last time, is common in the Quran. And when I read it for the first time that morning, it was with the sense that the Quranic voice is more often ministerial than dogmatic, a voice which understands that beneath the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, we all falter and make mistakes, and gives examples of, of when and why God is so forgiving. To be clear, I had absolutely tremendous experiences reading the Bible as well as many of us do. I read Ecclesiastes and I thought that's it all the wisdom of antiquity and everything about the human condition in one short text. I read the short narrative in the Gospel of John in which Jesus tells anyone without sin to cast the first stone, and I still think it's my favorite short narrative ever written. I grew up on schlocky action movies, so I'm a sucker for badass one liners. And to be equally clear, I didn't read the entire Quran with a sense of ingenuous awe like I did Surat al Baqarah either. The Quran is extremely repetitious, such that it's hard for me to understand how a hafil or someone who has the whole book memorized can keep so so many topically interchangeable and structurally similar verses in their memory. But within the Quran's repetitiousness, there is a strength too a consistency and simplicity in what is conveyed that works to the book's advantage. The Quran is not like the Tanakh and New Testament, a miscellany of documents written by different individuals over multiple generations. Its voice, its cosmogony, and its eschatology are broadly consistent across the 114 surahs. There is a tranquil wisdom in its voice that bespeaks the ancient and heterogeneous West Arabian culture from which the Quran first came. So if you never get a chance to read the Quran for yourself, the one thing I'd like for you to remember is that beneath all the subsequent history that's unfolded, and beneath the usual Abrahamic truckloads of exegesis and law codes written in its wake, the magic of the Quran has always been that it is an optimistic, inspirational scripture with copious awareness of its own theological prehistory, and one that sees itself as the capstone to all of that prehistory. Like all later rivals and younger siblings, the Quran has the advantage of understanding the strengths and shortcomings of what came along before it. And to this day, its ever changing voice still radiates off the printed page, sometimes hot as fire, but more often as mellow and hopeful as a winter sunrise. A while ago, to introduce this season of the podcast, we took an imaginary walk in Mecca in the winter of 570, when the old pagan version of the Hajj was still going on, we imagined how, inside the Kaaba's courtyard, and probably beyond it in squares and boulevards dedicated to trade and commerce at the old School Hajj, we'd have seen a veritable who's who of the Arabian Peninsula. Sheikhs from major tribes, sea Traders, desert bumpkins, gawking at the size of everything. Smiths and wainwrights, breeders and herders, potters and masons, guides and mercenaries, healers and veterinarians and priests, magis, rabbis and poets, all there for the pilgrimage month, there for some combination of piety and profit, for a place and time most often associated with Al Jahiliya or ignorance. There would be, in point of fact a lot of knowledge and expertise gathered in pre Islamic Mecca. Knowledge of geography all over the Hijaz, of probably dozens of languages, of caravanning and seafaring, of far off kingdoms and close by aquifers going rates for trade goods and interest rates for loans and investments. The generation who gathered at the old shrine of Abraham in 570 with heads full of Noah and Jesus and Jinn and Al Aza and the Virgin Mary who gathered around Rawis and other tellers of tales. They shared a theologically multifarious world, ungoverned by rabbinates and bishoprics. It was a region that had no orthodoxy imposed on it, but at the same time a region that in one scholar's words, quote, had become hyper religious from all the surrounding forces acting on it. Mecca's religious climate, the year of the Prophet's birth was amalgamated, molten and free. Home to most of the theological traditions of western Eurasia, but not subject to any one of them. Where truisms about Job and Jinn and John the Baptist and Whobell and Allah could be heard in the same conversation or stage performance. Where there was no apocrypha because there was no canon to begin with in Islam. One of the great debates in and after the 9th century has been whether or not the Quran was created, or whether it existed alongside God for all eternity before Muhammad brought the Surahs to earth. Different epochs of Islamic Islamic history have had different takes on this theological question. But whatever your exact position on Quranic createdness is one thing is certain. Some of the Quran was absolutely there before Muhammad lived. Hanging in the sparks and moonlight following fireside recitations of old Abrahamic stories suspended in the air after Ra roadside chats by travelers exchanging late antique truisms with roots in the Bible, shimmering all over the peninsula as ancient Arabian folkways splashed together with Mediterranean and Persian religions and an old inland world of tribal honor met seafaring empires with boundless ambitions. The Quran was indeed there prior to Muhammad, who himself only alleged to be a prophet, reminding posterity of what had already been taught. Well, booyah literature and history listeners, we have taken a long tour through the Al Adiyan al Ibrahimiyya or the Abrahamic religions, and accomplished the unusual feat of reading the Old Testament, the New Testament and the Quran together with a great many associated materials. This might be a fitting time to make some additional remarks about all three scriptures together as a set, but this episode has already grown long and we really should move forward and discuss the period of the early Caliphates before setting all three Abrahamic scriptures on our desk and seeing what we make of them together. So let's save that for the concluding episode of this season. There is plenty that I would have liked to cover in the Quran, but with literature being the main focus of this podcast and the subject of my degrees, I am ultimately covering early Islamic history in order to steer us towards some of the great works of Arabic and Persian literature, and so I will leave more extensive analysis of the Quran to those who are better qualified. I highly encourage you to get a copy of the Quran for yourself and read at least some of it. The Oxford Mas Abdel Halim translation is quite readable and has just the right amount of notes. The Penguin Tariff Khalidi translation is innovatively a combination of both prose and verse, just like the Quran itself, and for an extensively annotated and scholarly edition, you can't beat the Harper One Study Quran, edited by Seyd Hossein Nasser and including a stupendous amount of introductory material and essays. At the end, I have links to those in this episode's show notes and yeah, there are books you can pass over in your education. The Quran, at least the first few long, earth shatteringly beautiful surahs, is like the Torah and wisdom books and the Gospels, something that all of us, regardless of our backgrounds, ought to actually open up and read at some point. Let's talk about what's next. Later in this season we will talk about the Byzantine Sasanian War of 602 to 628 and the twilight of the Persian Empire, because although Islam's roots are incontestably West Arabian Persian culture and people had a formative effect on Islamic history from the period of the early Caliphates onward. Also, later in this season, we need to talk about the Hadiths, those short narratives about the Prophet Muhammad which are second in importance to the Quran for Sunnis in the world today. However, in my opinion, having finished the story of Muhammad in last month's episode, and having finished the Quran in this month's three episodes, there's really one story that needs to be told most of all, and that is the saga of the Rashidun Caliphate Muhammad's friends and kin, Abu Bakr, Umar, Uthman and Ali, a quartet of Meccans from mercantile families with no background in military conquest or governmental administration from 632 to 661 undertook a territorial expansion so vast and consequential that it defies hyperbole, reducing the entire Sasanian Empire to subjugated provinces and client satrapies and ripping the Byzantine Empire in half. In one generation, the Rashidun Empire redirected the history of three continents, and everyone living today has been impacted by this epoch of Central Eurasian history. The Rashidun Caliphate has two histories, really, one of them an intercontinental tale of armies and conquests, and the other a more personal drama of tension between several famous clans of Meccan Arabs. We know from several episodes ago that when Abu Bakr came to rule as the first Caliph in June of 632, the equally eligible young Ali allowed his caliphal career to be punted to an unknown period on down the road. But what happened next, with Ali waiting in the wings? Why did Umar rule before him and Uthman too? How did the Shiite Ali, or Party of Ali, the predecessors of today's Shiites, react as the young man grew to middle age? How did the clans within the Quraysh tribe, the Banu Hashim, the Banu Taim, and finally the Banu Amaya, play into the high profile politics of the Rashidun Caliphate? Next time we'll answer all of these questions and learn how a tiny theocratic state in West Arabia came to dominate the middle of a supercontinent in less than 30 years. And I have a big announcement at the end of this big sequence. Last month I signed a contract with the publisher to write a book. Additionally, last month and this month I've been working on the book. I will tell you about it soon because it's nonfiction and very much related to literature and history. Over the course of the past seven weeks of 16 hour work days, however, I've fallen a bit behind on literature and history. Thus, with the three episodes released this month, I hope I've earned enough goodwill to take a month off. That will be November of 2025 and that next episode on the Rashidun Caliphate will be released on December 15, 2025. I have a quiz on this program@literatureandhistory.com As I said at the end of last month's episode, it has been a big sprint of effort to research, write and produce a free 14 hour soundtracked audio sequence on Muhammad and the Quran and release it in just a couple of months. So if you're feeling generous in terms of a donation, or upping a Patreon pledge, or renewing the credit card that you let expire on Patreon a long time ago, now would be a great time as your host is stretched thin and running on fumes. That said, I'm to going Glad you're here. Either way, I enjoyed producing these programs immensely, along with reading some Quranic scholarship I'd never gone through before, and going on some deep dives related to Quranic, Arabic and contemporary translations, and working with this season's editor, hi Abdul, to get help on Arabic pronunciation and Islamic scholarship more generally. I appreciate you trusting me to research, write and produce shows on sacred literature like the Quran and really look forward to exploring the remainder of the jaw dropping 7th century with you in the second half of the present season. So again, next time we'll return to our customary one show per month format, complete with a fun song at the end. Thanks for listening to literature and history and dude, good for you for caring enough to learn about the Quran in some degree of detail and the Rashidun Caliphs. And I will see you next time. Sa.