Islamic origins and the black swan

Does the presentation of topics about which there is great uncertainty demand first of all weighing in with dominant scholarly opinion?

Academic scholarship on Islam deals with many questions for which there are no certain answers. And yet these questions concern some of the most important matters of Islamic origins. Many of these questions have to do with the Muslim scripture, the Quran. At a 2005 conference on the Quran, Fred M. Donner, now University of Chicago professor emeritus of Near Eastern History, said:

---

Those of us who study Islam’s origins have to admit collectively that we simply do not know some very basic things about the Qur’ān — things so basic that the knowledge of them is usually taken for granted by scholars dealing with other texts. They include such questions as: How did the Qur’ān originate? Where did it come from, and when did it first appear? How was it first written? In what kind of language was — is — it written? What form did it first take? Who constituted its first audience? How was it transmitted from one generation to another, especially in its early years? When, how, and by whom was it codified? (p. 29 in this collection)

---

Readers not familiar with critical study of Islam may be surprised that so much seems to be up for grabs in Donner’s mind. This is possibly because many of the most popular “library versions” of Islam avoid this complexity and instead largely simply relay what Muslims believe. In other words, readers of many popular versions receive a “confessional” account that gives the impression of everything done and dusted.

In this new year I’m finding that I really need to buckle down and work steadily to complete a number of writing projects related to Islam — some which have been hanging on for years, and even a few that have come back to haunt me. In this humble substack, therefore, I will be letting readers in on these projects, highlighting the issues that I hope might interest you, and inviting comments that could help me to write better.

The first project to report is a request to write a chapter on the Quran for a textbook for university students. In response, I sent the editor a copy of a chapter on the Quran I wrote with Andrew Rippin for his collection The Islamic World (2008). The editor liked our older chapter and would be happy to see a revision of that content with a number of specified things added. But he flagged one point in particular. Rippin and I had been noncommittal about the Muslim belief that the words of the Quran were ‘revealed’ in Mecca and Medina 610-632 A.D., and whether one can know in which of four periods (Mecca divided up into ‘early,’ ‘middle’ and ‘late’) each of the Quran’s 114 sūras belongs.

The textbook editor said that the dating of Quranic texts according to the four periods of Mecca and Medina is “hardly ever fundamentally questioned” in the research discussions with which he is familiar. He asked me to first present the opinions of certain famous scholars of the past (going back to 1844) and their contemporary followers, and only then to “justify” my “reticence” to accept this dating scheme. Of course, I have known of this scheme since the first year of my studies in Islam more than 35 years ago at SOAS. But I have questioned that scheme at least since reading John Wansbrough’s query about the lack of scholarly “critical assessment of the principle” of “whether a chronology/topography of revelation is even feasible” (Quranic Studies, p. 126).

My situation seems to parallel the “black swans” gambit used by Oxford professor of Islamic Studies Nicolai Sinai. At the end of a careful two-part argument that the text of the Quran was fixed by 650 A.D. with the central involvement of the Muslim caliph ‘Uthmān, Sinai proposed that those who do not agree with his position are responsible to prove that it is not true. Sinai wrote, “[I]f the only swans we have ever encountered are white ones, it is the proponent of the existence of black swans whom we may legitimately expect to argue his case.” (Readers can pursue Sinai’s argument in the 2014 volume of the Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies.)

What’s interesting is that Sinai’s analogy is picked up in a more recent publication, Creating the Qur’an by University of Oregon professor of Religious Studies Stephen Shoemaker. Shoemaker writes his own careful review of diverse and conflicting early Muslim accounts about the production of the Quran and a kind of synthesis version of the story offered by an author in Islam’s third century named al-Bukhārī. He then explains how non-Muslim western scholars (going back to 1844) have treated the Muslim accounts. I recommend chapter 1 of Creating to any readers interested in this important topic.

Shoemaker acknowledges Sinai’s BSOAS articles and the weight of scholarly agreement with the Sunni Muslim story of the ‘Uthmānic collection. But he suggests that Sinai’s “analogue” of black swans may be “a bit mixed up.” From an academic “History of Religions” perspective, writes Shoemaker, the black swan is the ‘Uthmānic Quran itself. “When Sinai and others insist on the veracity of the Sunni tradition, they are asking us to believe in something that the history of religions repeatedly informs us is an extremely unlikely set of events” (p. 38). The remainder of Shoemaker’s book is actually what Sinai asked for: not a “proof,” however, but rather a series of detailed descriptions of different kinds of evidence that Shoemaker believes better favor a later fixing of the Quranic text.

That the Quran’s text was fixed in 650 by ‘Uthmān, and that the Quran’s sūras can be dated according to Mecca and Medina, are both traditional Sunni Muslim beliefs accepted by many modern western scholars of Islam today who follow what Shoemaker calls the “Nöldekean-Schwallian” paradigm. In this short column I am not advocating either side of either question. But in the midst of writing an academic chapter on the Quran for university students I have been wondering about pedagogy. Does the presentation of topics about which there is great uncertainty, and of popular views for which there is no sure evidence, start with description of a dominant scholarly approach, then require justification of any alternative view?

Scholars disagree. Paradigms change. Happily, I have come to a good understanding with the textbook editor and I am forging ahead with the chapter he requested. In the meantime, readers are welcome to express their thoughts about the appropriate process. What can be known for sure about the Quran; the traditional beliefs of the confessing communities (including the Shī‘a); the opinions of academic scholars — How do these three relate, and in what order should they be presented?