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Notes -
There Are No Amendments In Islam
Sarah Haider writes a compelling analysis of the odd political re/alignment you see playing out today between Christians and Muslims on social issues:
There's really nothing surprising about this alliance at the object-level. What religious Christians and Muslims believe about how society should be structured in regards to promiscuity, sexual modesty, and traditional family structures have long been near-impossible to tell apart. The overlap also bleeds into superficial similarities about isolated rural ranchers defending their traditional way of life from outside influences, while openly carrying their firearms to their places of worship (am I talking about the Taliban or...?).
Sarah is correct that the modern alliance between liberal progressives and Muslims was a marriage of convenience that took advantage of some unusual culture war circumstances, but it's a tryst that was bound to fray apart given the fundamental policy disagreements. One of the efforts to keep the bandwagon held together comes from what Sarah terms Muslims in Name Only (MINOs):
I was raised Muslim but abandoned it as an atheist a long time ago, and this passage is particularly painful for how real it is. The discordant discourse above has largely been operating in parallel and disconnected tracks. On one side you get a bevy of purportedly "Muslim" activists announcing that Islam can mean whatever you want it to mean, and actual Muslim religious scholars responding with The Fuck?:
As an atheist I have all sorts of complaints about all religions, but the attempts to rehabilitate Islam's image to better fit liberal sensibilities are pernicious for their particular dishonesty. Because one of the few good things I'll say about Islam is to praise its unusual commitment towards scriptural fidelity.
In case you didn't know, Islam was founded around 600 AD explicitly as the final entry in the Abrahamic religion trilogy. Islam was not presented as an alternative to Judaism and Christianity, rather it was heralded as the true and uncorrupted version of those creeds. According to Islamic lore, Allah (literally just the Arabic word for God) created the world and everything in it and then spent the next however many millennia trying — and implicitly failing — to convey his divine message to humans through a long succession of prophets. First man Adam was also the first prophet, and he was followed by well-known Biblical heavy-hitters like Ayyub (Job), Musa (Moses), and of course 'Isa (Jesus). The full list is unknown and unknowable but Islam assures us that every community throughout history received at least one of Allah's Verified™ messengers.
The reason Muhammad of Mecca is special in Islam is because he's Allah's final message delivery attempt. Adam was the first, and Muhammad is heralded as the "Seal of the Prophets" to underscore the finality. I won't get into exactly why god needed so many attempts to convey his message, but a common point of criticism from Muslims about past attempts (such as Christianity) is that god's message was corrupted and lost through misguided translation attempts. I say this as a Muslim apostate with no stake in the debate but the concern over the Bible's reliability seems uncontroversially true to me given the inherent limitations of translation, and the resulting myriad of competing versions. After centuries of debating whether the in John 1:1 was intended to be a definite or indefinite article from the original Greek, I can see why someone would be too traumatized by the prospect of any translation attempt.
To their credit, early Muslim scholars appear to have taken this mistranslation concern very seriously. All of Muhammad's revelations were collected over time by his followers and, after his death in 632 AD, were compiled into a single book known as the Quran. Islamic theology insists that the Quran is the literal word of Allah which means it has never been modified. Given the religious motivations at play, it's natural to be skeptical of such a claim but it does appear to be solidly supported by the archeological evidence available, with the oldest Quranic manuscripts radiocarbon dated to between 568 and 645 AD and matching what we have available. The commitment to the divine inviolability of the Quran is also reflected in the expectation that, everywhere from America to Indonesia, all practicing Muslims are required to learn and recite passages in the original Arabic. Translations of the Quran exist of course, but reluctantly so and intended solely as a study aid.
The Quran is the central commanding text, but below it are hadiths — a sporadic collection of stories, speeches, and anecdotes attributed to Muhammad and a significant source for how to live the Good Muslim Life (covering topics such as when to assalamualaikum your bros, whether cats are cool, or how to wash oneself before praying). Unlike the Quran, hadiths are not seen as direct guidance from Allah. Instead, their reliability as a guiding lodestar is obsessively assessed in proportion to their authenticity. So some hadiths will be accepted as controlling authorities because they're heavily corroborated by reliable narrators, while others get dismissed because they're fourth-hand accounts on a weird topic and with a dodgy chain of transmission.
The point is, given the obsession over the lineage of the Quran and *hadiths, *it's no surprise that Muslims today come across as especially zealous about following their deen. There's no leeway to fall back on mealy-mouthed "Living Quran" rationalizations for why only some aspects of Islam should be obeyed but not others.
Islam's etymology is about unquestioning submission to authority, purportedly only to god's authority but that's a hard demarcation to keep in mind when political and religious power is near-impossible to disentangle within Muslim countries. Its focus on the eternal afterlife for doling out rewards for devotion endowed me with a fatalistic perspective about my temporary earthly existence at a formative time where I was still grappling with immigrating to the US. My depressed ass then couldn't wait to hurry up and die — an overwhelming desire to to get it over with already so that can experience the promised happiness at last. I left Islam because it's a regressive and stifling bundle of superstitions, ill-suited to living out a fulfilling existence. In consideration of the billions today living under its penumbra, I wish it wasn't so, but that sentiment is not enough to change reality.
I'm comfortable saying that the MINOs who self-appoint themselves as the religion's modern rehabilitators are blatantly lying. If I had to guess at their motives, it probably has something to do with the fact that being a member of a religious minority is too valuable an emblem within the Progressive Stack of oppressed identities to give up completely. For Islam to be the religion least amenable to revisionism does not matter when it's put up against such an irresistible force.
Wait, does that mean that they would accept the untranslated versions? We definitely still have those. (Or, more precisely, while there are minor textual differences between manuscripts, we can be sure of the text of the vast majority, and even more if you only care about ones where the differences are at all meaningful)
No. This is a polemic tracing its way directly to Mohammed. He claimed he was prophesied in the Torah and Gospel (a common sort of claim for an upstart) and he just...wasn't. The Qur'an cannot be wrong, so the solution for him was to claim it was corrupted. The Qur'anic phrasing usually implies mistranslation or lying - it says people cover up the truth or lie with their mouths, not that the books were lost. It's a more extreme version of the polemics of some early Christians about Jews hiding prophecies of Jesus. God has a sense of humor.
But Muslims eventually* realized that what Christians especially believed about the Gospel was utterly incompatible with their own (the Qur'an seems to believe it was a Qur'an-like book given to Jesus that commanded his followers to fight and die) and so they insisted that it was utterly, totally lost. Meanwhile the Torah was conveniently corrupted enough to eliminate the references to Mohammed.
This also led to a polemic that Islam was so much better because it was perfectly preserved. Not actually true but Islam does have earlier witnesses of the Qur'an compared to say...the Bible and they're remarkably similar to what we have, even though there's still variants due to the consonantal text. Muslims reacted really badly to even one Islamic scholar pointing out "holes in the narrative". It's a deeply emotional issue, a pillar they take for granted.
Muslims instrumentally use critical scholarship to point to things like the Documentary Hypothesis that they think backs their view of corruption. But they will never take the conclusions to their natural end. Conclusions like:
Yes, things like the Exodus and Patriarchs are inherently historically dubious and part of works that show clear artifice. Given the Qur'an copies them...
Yes, even though that is the case we actually have a very reasonable view of what the Bible says over centuries, even if it isn't historically credible and there's no "Muslim Gospel of Jesus" or missing links in the Torah - it's an apologetic construction. We have a general idea of when books were compiled and we certainly have a lot of witnesses and variants that help us try to figure out what was meant (unlike the Qur'an where the "bad" manuscripts were all burned by Caliphal fiat).
There's no "'goldilocks zone" where we accept all we've learned about corruption but also the Bible is corrupted in these exact ways that're helpful for Islam but also substantially true in the telling of its legends that we know from critical scholarship are dubious.
tl;dr: Textual criticism for Muslims is a train: they reach their station (Bible is corrupted and they took out the references to Mohammed) and get off. No amount of showing them ancient copies of Deuteronomy that match what we have now will change their minds. They're right for the wrong reasons.
* The Bible probably wasn't translated into Arabic in Mohammed's time. In fact: a lot of the stories people think the Qur'an got from the Bible actually came from Syriac Christian apocryphal versions that likely would have been spread orally in the region. Most obviously Jesus' miracle of breathing life into the clay birds - not Biblical, but from the Infancy Gospel of Thomas.
Interestingly, from this side of the fence, Islam was treated early on as a Christian heresy rather than a separate religion of its own - see Dante putting Mohammed and Ali into the bolge of the Schismatics in the Eight Circle of Hell in the Inferno.
People of the time certainly didn't consider it original: "And when Our verses are recited to them, they say, "We have heard. If we willed, we could say [something] like this. This is not but legends of the former peoples." (Q8:31).
The modern revisionist school (people like Fred Donner and Stephen Shoemaker) sees Islam as a sort of ecumenical Abrahamic movement of "Believers" that reached out to conquer the Holy Land (which might explain the smoothness of the conquests). Later Caliphs had to construct a more exclusionary identity for "Muslims" in the wake of Mohammed's death (since most of the biographical material is relatively late by Gospel standards)
IMO Muslims early on probably didn't think of themselves as a distinct and overriding religion. Besides the reasons stated, the Quran says that it was sent so the Arabs could have their own revelation (which fits with the absence of an Arabic Bible at the time) and multiple times it speaks to insist the other groups judge by their books.
The Qur'an clearly relies on other faiths to back Islam (Q7:157) and tells them to judge by their existing books - the doctrine of corruption has done a remarkable job at obscuring that Islam can't actually be a theologically self-sustaining religion for this reason.
The book gives us a criteria to prove Islam and...it lies with other faiths. You can see why the rejection of the Qur'an by Jews prompted such issues and polemics and why Muslims today have this weird mix of token respect for the Bible as an earlier stage in the fossil record but also it's corrupt and you don't need it and maybe don't even read it cause people changed it to lie.
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