Any scripture with well over a billion believers on an increasingly small planet demands to be read by the rest of us. Even more, the Qur’an demands to be read by Christians, since it claims to complete our Bible and even improve on it. But most non-Muslims get no more than a few pages into the Qur’an before finding themselves hopelessly lost. In fact, Westerners who make it through all 286 verses of the Qur’an’s second chapter, orsura, deserve a pat on the back, because it is anything but reader friendly to us a world away and well over a millennium removed in time.
Our first challenge then is simply to understand the Qur’an, which is not “a written, premeditated corpus of prophetical sayings,” but rather “the transcript of an orally performed, open-ended drama.”1 The Qur’an’s every word is centered in Muhammad’s struggle for “God’s Cause”2 in his native Arabia. As Angelika Neuwirth says, we must read the Muslim scripture as a series of texts growing out of “lively scenes from the emergence of a community” under its prophet.3 Examples of her point abound. For example, Sura 93 urges Muhammad not to give up but to believe God will provide for him. By contrast, Q 8:67-71 speaks of the prophet’s having enslaved captives taken in battle and addresses the issue of his followers’ love of booty. We thus see that at one point Muhammad struggled to endure in faith, and at another he and his community, orumma, engaged in warfare and believed booty and slavery were regulated by divine command. In that sense the Qur’an represents an immense cache of historical data.
But despite the centrality of Muhammad’s story to its recitations, they include only glimmers of it. For while the Qur’an pays considerable attention to narratives from the past, it is quite averse to supplying current narrative—and that despite the fact that Muhammad’s recitations came to him in the midst of some very stormy events. Instead of recounting those events, the Qur’an “merely refers to them; and in doing so, it has a tendency not to name names.”4 The qur’anic author5 often speaks as “I” or “we” or alternates between the two (e.g., Q 90:1-4) and addresses “you” in singular and plural (e.g., Q 94:1-4) but without identifying anyone. That leaves us piecing together the story behind the recitations as best we can from the mention of an unnamed town or other fragmentary details. For example, the Qur’an speaks of a “sacred precinct” (Q 5:1) and Christians (nasara). But which sacred precinct, and what kind of Christians?
These and a host of other questions find their answer only in the Qur’an’s metahistory or narrative context. Being well known to those who first heard its recitations, however, most of that background information is left unstated, making the Qur’an singularly unhelpful as a historical source when taken on its own. Neither are its suras ordered chronologically.6 All this makes the Qur’an “an extremely enigmatic and allusive document,”7 one requiring readers to bring to the text some knowledge of Muhammad’s historical context and prophetic career.
The Qur’an and Its Interpretation
According to the Qur’an, God, its implied speaker throughout, had revealed his Word in other languages for other peoples and was now putting it into Arabic for the Arabs (Q 12:1-2; 13:37; 20:11). The qur’anic monologues were delivered orally by Muhammad in the early seventh century CE and eventually collected and transcribed. The Qur’an denounced Arab polytheism and announced God’s imminent judgment. As we will see, we can reasonably assume that Muhammad’s pagan hearers had some awareness of biblical monotheism, since Christianity and Judaism offered the only o