Scepticism in Academia?

Evidently not welcome when it comes to Muslim views about Islamic origins

One of the areas of writing about Islam that some of my readers may find surprisingly interesting is the lively disputation among non-Muslim western academic scholars about the origins of Islam.

Book reviews in the highly specialized Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies may generally fail to appeal, but the subject of a review article published there last month — and the energy of the reviewer — reach out beyond the tight circle of specialists.

Under review is Stephen J. Shoemaker’s Creating the Qur’an (University of California Press, 2022), a fascinating, controversial, and highly readable argument for a date for the fixation of the text of the Quran later than Muslims believe. The Muslim belief is well known. The controversy comes mainly from the fact that most western academics seem to believe that traditional fixation date as well.

The reviewer is Bruce Fudge, a professor at the Université de Genève. Fudge disagrees strenuously with the thesis of Shoemaker’s book and provides 16 pages of arguments against it. Fortunately also published online open access, the review by Fudge is titled “Skepticism as method in the study of Quranic origins.”

Very briefly, most Muslims believe that the text of the Quran was fixed under the third Islamic caliph, ‘Uthmān, around the middle of the seventh century — in other words around 20 years after Muslims believe Muhammad died. Disputing this date, Shoemaker makes the case that the fixing of the text was done about 50 years later, during the reign of the Umayyad caliph ‘Abd al-Malik (r. 685-705).

This short column is neither a review of the review article nor a defence of the book, but rather merely tries to describe some of the main issues that readers can explore further on their own. Here I am trying to avoid some of the more excruciating detail, though I would of course consider furnishing the full pain in a future column if requested.

Fudge gives the first several pages of his review to explaining and justifying the choice of western academics to accept a narrative about the formation of the Quran that is largely confessional and is based on relatively late sources. Starting on the defensive is quite understandable: in Creating, Shoemaker bursts out of the gate swinging at academics who make that choice.

Fudge then gives the heart of his review (pages 5-13) to chapters 1 and 2 of Creating, which include Shoemaker’s questioning of uncritical loyalty to the traditional Muslim narrative and his case for establishment of the text under ‘Abd al-Malik. Fudge’s most effective criticism is that Shoemaker missed details by not reading sufficiently deeply and carefully in the Arabic sources that Creating cites for his argument. Whether you accept or reject the credibility of the earliest Islamic sources, writes Fudge, you should have an accurate understanding of what they say.

For example, writes Fudge, Shoemaker evidently took the word of earlier scholars that a tradition of an early collection of the Quran by Abū Bakr, the first caliph, is not found in the Tabaqāt of Ibn Sa‘d (died 845 AD). Fudge points out that in the more complete edition of the Tabaqāt the tradition can be found, and quotes the original Arabic.

This criticism is significant and, knowing Shoemaker, I imagine he would say “thanks for the tip.” However, it leads to one of the main points that Shoemaker makes in his book, and in fact seems to spotlight it. Readers will notice that Ibn Sa‘d wrote approximately 200 years after Abū Bakr reigned, according to Muslim tradition. What is the evidentiary value of a report in a source written so long after the purported event?

Here Shoemaker draws attention to the larger field of academic studies in the “history of religions,” especially the Religionsgeschichtliche Schule that emerged at the University of Göttingen around the end of the nineteenth century. That approach turned away from the dogmatic interests of believers toward a radically historicized perspective. Shoemaker’s critique of the western study of Islam by non-Muslims is that, by contrast, it has aligned itself with confessional Islamic views under the guidance of influential scholars such as Wilfred Cantwell Smith, formerly of McGill and Harvard.

In modern academic scholarship on the New Testament, how would a gap of 200 years between event and written report be viewed? For example, sources on Christian origins written in the early third century? And yet, as is evident from the title of Fudge’s review, he sees “scepticism” as something negative when it comes to the study of Quranic origins.

The point is worth further comment. The best-known and most-often-cited Islamic traditions claiming collections of the Quran under Abū Bakr and ‘Uthmān appear in the Hadith collection of Bukhārī (d. 870) based on a tradition from Zuhrī (d. 741-2). Up to the present no writing of Zuhrī is known to exist, but Fudge both credits Zuhrī for a trustworthy report one century after the purported collections and trusts the accurate transmission of the report for the 130 or so years between Zuhrī and Bukhārī.

At a couple of points Fudge suggests that Shoemaker’s scepticism clashes with the “historical-critical” method in the subtitle of Creating. But here the two scholars seem to be missing each other. For Shoemaker, being “critical” indeed means asking reasonable questions about the material under study related to its historical and cultural contexts. Belief and doubt are appropriate terms for the choices western academics make about the traditional Muslim narrative because they — including Fudge in his review — acknowledge that they do not know what actually happened.

Beyond those two chapters of Creating, Fudge offers a brief response to chapters 3-9, in which Shoemaker discusses radiocarbon dating of Quran manuscripts, the question of literacy in central Arabia in the seventh century, and especially the light that memory science might shine on the shape of the transmission of the Quranic text and Muslim traditions about it. Many readers who are not familiar with the issues of Islamic origins would find these self-contained chapters interesting. From different angles, they attempt to move the academic discussion forward from the evident stalemate of either agreeing or disagreeing with Muslim tradition.

In chapter 8 Shoemaker suggests that given a period of 70 years for the development of the text of the Quran (which his thesis of fixation under ‘Abd al-Malik would allow), the formation of the Quran could be seen to share a number of features with the development of the New Testament. Fudge characterizes this as Shoemaker’s insistence that “what happened in the Christian case must also be so for Islam” (p. 15).

Well I believe that about captures the general gist of some of the interesting issues in Prof. Fudge’s review of Creating the Quran. Let me know, readers, if I got it wrong. I just hope that I have left enough gaps to pique the curiosity of readers in the full review article — and in the book.