Alan Dundes on the Qur'an

Fables of the Ancients? Folklore in the Qur'an by Alan Dundes
"The most renowned folklorist of his time" tackles the Qur'an

I'll bet that everyone who knew him has a favorite Alan Dundes story. Here's a couple of mine. To understand both, you have to know that Dundes was larger than life in many ways, including physically. I somehow don't want to apply the adjective "fat" to him, although, yes, he was. Some called him "a tank," others, "a rhino." He was so formal and so formidable that I resort to an old-fashioned word, "portly."

I only ever saw him in a charcoal gray suit, white shirt, and dark tie. And he knew everything about his field. Students would line up in chairs along the back of his office wall. They would approach, timidly, one by one. They would burble about their family's traditional Persian Nawruz celebration, or a Yiddish joke, or a Peruvian children's game, that is, material that they had stored in their mind's attic among their most intimate and cherished memories, and that they thought belonged to them alone, and Dundes would immediately provide the student with numerous citations to scholarly articles addressing the very obscure factoid they thought they'd never fully understand. After their encounter with Dundes, they walked out of his office into an expanded world, a world of meaning and wonder in which they were playing a vital part every time they told that half-remembered joke, every time they played that childhood game. You aren't alone, the scholarship Dundes introduced students to said. There are others who told the same joke, played the same games. There is a meaning to all this; there is a story; it is dense and rich and everlasting.

So, yes, Dundes was big. And he was funny as hell. Hundreds of students registered for his classes, which were held in an auditorium. He was up there on stage making us laugh, and then inviting us to eye-opening, even outrageous interpretations of every day events. He'd weave in something as ordinary as a traffic sign, cite some Freud, tell a joke, and before you knew it your mind was pinging around like an explorer's finger on a globe and you had the sense that life is a wonderful mystery and this guy possessed many of the clues.

One day he introduced a particularly complex lecture. You had to hang on every word to grok the unfolding revelation. When he finished, many of us thought we were in the presence of the smartest guy on a campus with many Nobel Laureates.

At that moment, a young blonde asked a stupid question. Her question suggested to us that she hadn't really been listening to the lecture, and that she didn't care that she was revealing that she hadn't been listening to the lecture. Her question insulted, and deflated, Dundes. Impatient, aware of his own worth Dundes sniffed, "That was a stupid question."

We all gasped. A minute before we had been surfing with him a wave of joyful discovery. Her cluelessness, and his dismissal, crashed us onto a jetty's boulders.

Dundes, dark and massive, paced a few steps; the auditorium was so hushed we could hear the stage floorboards creak beneath him. Dundes wasn't just arrogant. He was also charming. His bonhomie returned. He stopped and turned to the young lady. "I'm sorry," he said to her, in his most tender, grandfatherly aural caress. "I shouldn't have said that. There's no such thing as a stupid question."

We exhaled.

Dundes paced to the edge of the stage. He swung his bulk around dramatically and shouted, "But that came pretty damn close!"

We exploded in laughter.

One of the regrets of my life is that I found it hard to interact with Dundes, and he found it hard to interact with me. I'm blue collar. I swept floors and swabbed toilets before and after his lectures to work my way through Berkeley grad school. His father was a lawyer; mine, a coal miner. He went to Yale, I, as he reminded me with typical bluntness, got my BA at an "undistinguished state school." Dundes told a dumb Polak joke in class. I went to his office and we yelled at each other. I operated on the assumption that he hated me; it was only after I finished that I learned from someone else that he had "pulled strings he didn't know existed" to get me funding. Ironically, we shared a common ancestral homeland: Poland.

My second story took place more than a decade later, in 2005. I had my PhD, had published work that I assessed was as good as the standard Dundes' superb oeuvre had set for me, and, given that we were now thousands of miles apart and communicating via email, I found it easier to talk to him. I thought that maybe, just maybe, I might someday ask permission to address him by his first name. I sent him an email asking for prayer for my academic career. He responded in an email that enveloped me in a completely new atmosphere. I no longer felt that I was one of a handful of students lining the back of his office wall, awaiting my brief encounter with the great man. He spoke to me as if I were his equal, even his intimate. He spoke about faith. I was overwhelmed. Suddenly I had to relearn how to interact with him. I devoted quiet time to contemplating how to respond to this new Prof. Dundes. And then a friend phoned me and said that he thought that the New York Times obituary for Alan Dundes had been too short. Dundes had collapsed and died of a heart attack while teaching a class he had once taught me, and so many others. To the last, I never got to say all of what I wanted to say to him, in the way that I yearned to say it.

Alan Dundes said things that people didn't want him to say. His controversial book, Life is Like a Chicken Coop Ladder: A Study of German National Character through Folklore argued for a strain of anal erotic obsession in German national character. His even more controversial article, "Into the Endzone for a Touchdown: A Psychoanalytic Consideration of American Football" cited homoerotic aspects in the sport. I think both these works are brilliant. "The Hero Pattern in the Life of Jesus," in which Dundes argues that Jesus never existed, and his image, crucified between two thieves, is nothing more than a reference to a penis and two testicles, is bizarre and just plain wrong.

No doubt Dundes' riskiest work is Fables of the Ancients? Folklore in the Qur'an published in 2003 by Rowman & Littlefield. In this 94-page booklet, Dundes points out that the Qur'an gives every indication of being an orally transmitted work that recycles pre-existing folklore. This is not a new or, in scholarly circles, controversial assertion. Even so, thinkers and authors have been killed for stating basic facts about Islam. One thinks of Hitoshi Igarashi, the murdered Japanese translator of Salman Rushdie's book The Satanic Verses; and also Ettore Capriolo, the Italian translator, and Salman Rushdie himself, who both survived stabbings; the Charlie Hebdo mass shooting; the murder of Theo van Gogh, and too many other Islam-mandated murders to list here. Given the risk involved, Dundes treads carefully.

The Qur'an itself states more than once that its first hearers identified it as, as the book's title quotes, nothing but recycled "fables of the ancients," that is, material that the audience has heard before in oral circulation or encountered in the Old and New Testaments. And Islamic tradition insists that Muhammad, who allegedly received the Qur'an in a series of revelations from the angel Jibril (from the Biblical Gabriel), was illiterate. Unable to read or write, Muhammad heard the Qur'an and then repeated what he heard to his followers, who, after his death, did their admittedly flawed and incomplete best to gather their memories together into a written document. Sam Shamoun addresses Muslim admissions of this "Incomplete and Imperfect Qur'an" here.

Yes, there is widespread acknowledgment of the Qur'an's oral nature and its recycling of previously disseminated material. But a scholar applying to the Qur'an the same scholarly tools for analyzing texts that scholars apply to other documents? Muslims interpret this as a call to war. To understand why even many Muslims with PhDs and working in Western institutions reject analysis of the Qur'an, and indeed any study of the question of the historicity of Muhammad or examinations of the truth value of Islam's history of itself, we must review why the Qur'an is not comparable to other world scriptures.

The Qur'an is sometimes referred to as "Islam's Bible." These comparisons mislead. At least since the work of French Professor of Medicine Jean Astruc (1684-1766), Christians have subjected the Bible to accepted academic methods for examining any text, secular or sacred. Rigorous examination of the Bible is ongoing, on college campuses, in popular bestsellers, and in YouTube videos produced by exegetical entrepreneurs like Michael Jones in his Inspiring Philosophy channel.

When scholars like Israel Finkelstein and Bart Ehrman argue against the reliability of the Bible, they are not stabbed to death by self-appointed avengers; they are refuted in articles, books, and in live debates. Biblical maximalists like Kenneth Kitchen stand up to the plate and argue from archaeology and other evidence that the Bible agrees with known history. Archaeologist Merrill Unger says of Luke, who wrote about a third of the New Testament, "The Acts of the Apostles is now generally agreed in scholarly circles to be the work of Luke, to belong to the first century and to involve the labors of a careful historian who was substantially accurate." See more about Luke's astounding accuracy here.

Comparable academic analysis of the Qur'an has never taken place in a Muslim-dominated environment, and given the Islamic dogma detailed below, it's clear that, as long as humans continue to submit to Islam's totalitarian demands, such analysis of the text that regiments approximately two billion followers' everyday lives can never take place in a Muslim-dominated environment. Beyond Islam's reach, Robert Spencer, Jay Smith, Tom Holland and others have popularized the many problems with Islam's origin story. Islam's claims about the key site of Mecca, for just one example, are just not plausible.

Witness author Tom Holland's interview with Seyyed Hossein Nasr in Holland's controversial 2012 documentary, Islam, the Untold Story. Holland's documentary was controversial because it argues that historical facts do not agree with canonical Muslim accounts of the birth of Islam. Holland applies scholarly historiographic tools to historical evidence like surviving chronicles written during the Arab Conquest, coins minted by early Arab conquerors, and geography. Holland decides that historical reality seems to indicate that, rather than Islam creating the Arab Conquest, the Arab Conquest cobbled together Islam as a charter justifying that conquest and unifying the new empire. Holland's application of scholarly rigor to Islam was unacceptable to Muslims. Within a week of one TV broadcast of Islam, the Untold Story, 1,200 complaints poured in. Channel 4, while "extremely proud" of the film, canceled a screening because of death threats. Holland received anonymous messages including, "You might be a target in the streets. You may recruit some bodyguards, for your own safety."

Seyyed Hossein Nasr is "University Professor" – a prestigious title – of Islamic studies at George Washington University. Prof. Nasr is also the eponym of the Seyyed Hossein Nasr Foundation. The Foundation's goal is "manifesting perennial teachings as contained in the Quran."

George Washington University "was chartered in 1821 as Washington, D.C.'s first university by the United States Congress, GW is one of six universities in the United States with a congressional charter … Notable alumni, faculty, and affiliates include 16 foreign heads of state or government, 28 United States senators, 27 United States governors, 18 U.S. Cabinet members, and five Nobel laureates." George Washington University has received tens of millions of dollars in overseas funding, including from China, Saudi Arabia, and Kuwait. It is among the top fifteen recipients of funding from Arab sources, and it has received the highest number of contracts.

In Islam, the Untold Story, Holland asked Prof. Nasr if someone who was not a devout Muslim could produce a valuable history of the origins of Islam. "No," Nasr replied. The West emphasizes reason, Nasr says. Reason, he argues, will not result in a product that is "satisfying." Once the world is "reduced" to the "mechanical" "all other levels of reality lose their status as being real and they're relegated to the realm of superstition. What is not seen is considered not to exist." Nasr also associates any Westerner studying Islam with bigoted and oppressive imperialists. Prof. Nasr, who holds a prestigious title at an influential university, demonstrates why applying the same academic microscope to Islam that is applied to any other belief system is a non-starter in a Muslim-dominated environment. In respect to their treatment by scholars, the Bible and the Qur'an are not comparable.

The Qur'an and the Bible differ in fundamental textual criteria. The number of authors of the Bible is estimated to be about forty. These authors are all assumed to have been Jewish, with the possible, but not certain, exception of Luke. The Qur'an is said to be the product of one man, Muhammad, although the historicity of that attribution is debated. Muhammad was not Jewish, but an Arab. He was not one of the people the Bible says would produce universal blessing and salvation; see Genesis 12:3, John 4:22, and, on the historical role of Muhammad's putative ancestors, see Genesis 16:11-12.

Some say that the Bible was written over the course of 1,500 years; others say only over about half that. In any case, the Bible was written over the course of at least hundreds of years. The Qur'an is said to have been revealed to Muhammad over the course of twenty-three years. The Bible was written in three languages: Hebrew, Aramaic, which is closely related to Hebrew, and Koine Greek, a lingua franca spoken by Jews and others after the conquests of Alexander the Great. The Qur'an is in Arabic, and considered authentic only in Arabic.

There are several different genres in the Bible. Each genre is received differently by its audience, as is the case today. One does not read an article in The New York Times the same way one reads the inscription in a humorous Hallmark card; one does not read a fairy tale the same way one reads a doctor's prescription. The Bible's genres include history, law, poetry, biography, prophecy, proverbs, parables, eschatology, letters, and novella. The Qur'an strikes this reader as one, extended, unhinged rant.

The Qur'an is roughly one tenth the size of the Bible. Given its many repetitions, as Don Richardson points out in his book Secrets of the Koran, "If every statement or story that is repeated in the Koran was given only once, the entire Koran would slim down to approximately 40 percent of its published length." That would produce a document four percent of the Bible's length.

The Qur'an's themes are not comparable to themes in the Bible. Allah is very much not a father. Love is very much not the book's theme. There is no Good Samaritan story informing Muslims that even non-Muslims are their neighbors and worthy of equal treatment. Rather, the Qur'an informs Muslims that they are the best of created beings, and non-Muslims are the worst of all creatures.

The Qur'an harps on hell and describes graphic, sadistic punishments in a way that the Bible never does. Richardson calculates that "There is one threat of hell in every 7.9 verses." The word "hell" is mentioned only thirty-one times in the entire Old Testament; that is, by Richardson's count, once in every 774 verses. In the New Testament, "perdition" and "fire" – as in the fire of hell – are mentioned once in every 120 verses. The Qur'an's descriptions of hell are detailed in a way that the Bible's never are. Allah, for example, will burn the skin off of human faces, and then replace that skin with new skin so he can burn it off again. The Qur'an repeats a similar taunt over and over. "You shall surely taste the painful punishment," "Taste the chastisement of shame," "taste the woe of famine and fear," "taste the vehement torment," "taste the torment of the flame," "taste the violence," "taste the torment of the burning," and "taste the ill consequences." Allah talks like a cackling Bond villain.

Richardson counts 109 jihad verses. The Answering Islam website counts 164 jihad verses, and includes a chart that quotes them. Those who refuse jihad are assured of hell. Those Muslims who refuse to carry out jihad will surely "taste the torment." Those who die in jihad are issued heavenly virgins of both sexes.

The Qur'an similarly details exactly what one can expect of heaven. The Bible never does so. The Biblical Paul may have had a glimpse of heaven himself, or he knows someone who was allowed such a glimpse. Paul speaks in hushed tones of the experience, refusing to provide any details. Paul, or some other witness, "was caught up to paradise and heard inexpressible things, things that no one is permitted to tell." In contrast, the Qur'an promises a heaven where men can have sex with perpetually virgin women and boys while reclining on luxurious couches under trees heavy with fruit. Believers sit beside flowing rivers; some rivers flow with water, others, with milk, wine, and honey. Believers bedeck themselves with precious stones, and drink all the wine they can swallow.

The opening lines of the Qur'an are known as Al-Fatihah, or The Opening. Muslims are required to repeat Al-Fatihah seventeen times a day. Al-Fatihah curses Christians as having gone astray, and Jews as earning Allah's wrath.

The Qur'an states that "The unbelievers among the people of the Book, and among the Polytheists, shall go into the fire of Gehenna to abide therein for aye. Of all creatures are they the worst! But they who believe and do the things that are right – these of all creatures are the best!" Jews are the worst enemies of Muslims, according to 5:82. According to Dr. Bill Warner, "Much of the Islamic doctrinal texts relate to the Kafir [non-Muslims]. The majority (64%) of the Koran refers to them, and nearly all of the Sira (81%) is about Mohammed’s struggle with the Kafir. 37% of the Hadith of Bukhari concerns them. Overall, the Trilogy devotes 51% of its content to the Kafir." Warner compares canonical Muslim scripture with Mein Kampf and discovers that there is more antisemitic material in the former. He cites thirteen Qur'an verses that expressly tell Muslims not to befriend Christians or Jews: 9:23, 3:28, 3:118, 4:89, 4:138, 4:144, 60:1, 60:13, 5:57, 5:78, 58:14, 5:55, 5:51. And of course the Qur'an reports that Allah turned Jews into apes and pigs.

The Qur'an's devotion of so much verbiage to inculcating hatred against non-Muslims is unique in world scriptures. One does not find comparable material in any of the world's major religious texts. The Bible condemns behaviors of Pagans, for example child sacrifice, insincere prayer, and idol worship. But the Bible is also remarkable in its emphasis on common humanity. See, for example, Jeffrey K. Salkin's Righteous Gentiles in the Hebrew Bible: Ancient Role Models for Sacred Relationships. Of course the New Testament's Good Samaritan story advanced a revolutionary, non-tribal ethic. Jesus practices a non-tribal ethic in his encounters with a Roman centurion and in his longest recorded conversation, with a Samaritan woman. There is nothing to compare in the Qur'an.

The Qur'an is also different from the other big five world religion's scriptures in terms of its style. The Qur'an is not a chronological text that tells a coherent story from start to finish. Sentences appear without any apparent relation to each other. The pronouns "you," "he," "we," "they," and "I" are used and the reader is not sure to whom these pronouns refer. A pronoun may refer to one person in one sentence and in the subsequent sentence the same pronoun may refer to someone else. Words have unclear meaning. "Gerd Puin is an Islamist, German scholar. He says that fully 20% of the Qur'an is simply unintelligible. The reason it cannot be translated is because we don't even know what it means." For an example of such content, see the muqatta 'at, or mysterious letters. Letters from the Arabic alphabet appear in the Qur'an; there is no agreement as to what they refer to. And then there are verses  like 74:30, "Above it are nineteen," that puzzle readers.

One scholar, the pseudonymous Christoph Luxenberg, argues in his book The Syro-Aramaic Reading of the Koran: A Contribution to the Decoding of the Language of the Koran that the Qur'an's original sources were Christian liturgical material in the Syriac language; poor translation into Arabic is responsible for the Qur'an's incoherent words and passages, Luxenberg argues. Note that because of his work, Luxenberg, fearing death from Muslims, has chosen to remain anonymous.

Sometimes the Qur'an's lack of clarity is strategic. The Qur'an purposely disguises some of its uglier passages in coded language. The Qur'an tells its male readers that they can have sex with woman and girls captured in war, but it does not use frank language to do so. Rather, it refers to these women and girls as objects which the man "possesses" with his "right hand."

That the Qur'an is unclear is acknowledged by Islam itself. Muslims do not take their faith directly from the Qur'an. Rather, they rely on the hadith, the sayings of Muhammad, and on commentary. The Bible, while open to varying interpretations, is clear enough that many Christians adopt "sola scriptura," or reliance on the Bible alone, for their understanding of their faith.

The Qur'an is different than the Bible, the Vedas, the Tao Te Ching, Raven or Coyote Tales from North America, the Popol Vuh from Central America, the works of Ovid or Homer, in that Muslims will kill you if you burn a Qur'an, but no one who reveres any of the other above-mentioned texts will even think of hurting you for burning one of those texts. Physical copies of the Qur'an are treated as if they were religious idols. Muslims are advised to perform wudhu, that is ritualized ablutions, before so much as touching a Qur'an. Some wear gloves. Some place the Qur'an on elaborate carved and painted stands. That's because, though Islam advertises itself as the world's only purely monotheistic religion, in Islam the Qur'an assumes the status of a god. It is "uncreated," that is it is as eternal as Allah. To even suggest that anyone, at any time, "created" the Qur'an is a capital offense. Islam speaks of the Qur'an as a "divine, conscious agent." Sam Shamoun writes, "one renowned Muslim jurist named Qadi 'Iyad, citing the work of Malik, wrote that: He said about someone who said that the Qur'an is created, 'He is an unbeliever, so kill him.' He said in the version of Ibn Nafi', 'He should be flogged and painfully beaten and imprisoned until he repents.' In the version of Bishr ibn Bakr at-Tinnisi we find, 'He is killed and his repentance is not accepted.' (Qadi 'Iyad Musa al-Yahsubi, Muhammad Messenger of Allah (Ash-Shifa of Qadi 'Iyad), translated by Aisha Abdarrahman Bewley [Madinah Press, Inverness, Scotland, U.K. 1991; third reprint, paperback], p. 419)"

Given that the Qur'an is a divinity in all but name, it is perfect. Not one letter, not one punctuation mark of the Qur'an can be questioned. The Qur'an, given its perfection, can never be translated. The Qur'an is only the Qur'an in Arabic, no other language. There are hafizes, that is people who have memorized the entire Qur'an, who have no idea what it means. Like 80% of Muslims in the world today, they don't speak Arabic. Given its divine perfection, Muslims say that the Qur'an they have today is the exact same Qur'an first revealed to Muhammad. All Qur'ans have exactly the same text. This is a point of pride for Muslims, who scoff at variations in texts and translations of the Bible, and the ways that the Bible is debated by believers.

In fact, though, there has been no perfect preservation of the Qur'an. The Qur'an has changed over time and various geographic regions have various Qur'ans. Some Muslims, like the highly placed and influential Yasir Qadhi, do acknowledge that Muslim leaders have not been telling their followers the truth about the unchanging Qur'an. Qadhi, though, recommends that this information not be communicated to average Muslims, because it might cause them to lose faith.

In February, 2024, YouTube counter-jihadis Ridvan Aydemir and David Wood traveled to Israel. YouTuber Brandon Estes, a.k.a. "The Muslim Cowboy," posted verbal abuse directed at them. In response, David Wood photographed his foot on a Qur'an; Aydemir posted that image. Shortly thereafter, Israeli authorities approached Aydemir and informed him that the image is illegal, that he had to remove it, and if anything like that happened again there would be more trouble. In December, 2023, Denmark's parliament  passed a law making it illegal to burn a Qur'an. In June, 2023, US officials condemned the burning of a Qur'an in Sweden. Christians and Jews emphasize respect for the Qur'an.

In contrast, as a matter of course, Muslims disrespect the Bible every day. Contemporary Islamic dogma insists that Christians and Jews, out of perversity and defiance of God, "corrupted" scripture, and the contemporary Bible is the result of this wicked "corruption." Muslims insist this for power politics reasons. The Qur'an asserts the reliability of the Old Testament, or Tawrat, and the New Testament, or Injil. In Qur'an 5:44, Allah says he revealed the Tawrat in which was guidance and light; in 5:46 he says he revealed the Injil, full of guidance and light. The problem is that the Bible does not confirm the validity of the Qur'an. To address this conflict, Muslim leaders insist that wicked Christians and Jews corrupted the Bible in order to subvert the will of Allah. There is no evidence, though, of that corruption. For more on this, see David Wood's "Islamic Dilemma" YouTube video. In many Muslim countries, Muslims cannot read the Bible; doing so may result in imprisonment, torture, and death. Citizens are free to read the Qur'an in Christian-majority countries and Israel. Compare Muslims' contempt for the Bible and its believers with Christians' approach to the Old Testament. Christians accept the Old Testament in its entirety.

There's one more way that the Bible and the Qur'an are not comparable. The Bible has had massive impact on culture around the world. Even non-Christian, non-Western cultures toss around material first found in the Bible. Overseas newspapers from mostly Hindu and Muslim India, Buddhist Thailand, and Communist China, use phrases like "Turn the other cheek," "ten commandments," and "Good Samaritan." Biblical characters like Adam and Eve, Moses, Jesus, and Mary are widely known. Quotes from the Qur'an do not occupy a similar place in the human cultural landscape. Indeed, perhaps the most famous quote in the Qur'an, "Whoever saves a life, it will be as if they saved all of humanity," was cribbed from the Talmud.

One can appreciate Dundes' courage when undertaking even merely a folkloric analysis of the Qur'an. In so doing, he turned first to Milman Parry and Albert Lord. Scholars in literate cultures had long wondered, "Who was Homer?" and "How do illiterate people remember lengthy works?" American classicist Milman Parry set out to answer that question in 1933. He traveled to less literate regions of Yugoslavia where guslars, or singers of tales, recounted lengthy epics in live performances. Parry determined that performers did not repeat texts identically. Rather, they conveyed the general idea of the story, and used formulae as aids. These formulae fit slots in the story in terms of meter, meaning, and rhyme. Parry argued that Homer may or may not have ever existed. The Iliad and The Odyssey were not the products of one man. They were communal property, told and retold by many bards for many years before being set down in writing. Parry became the "Darwin of Homeric studies." He died at age 33, shot to death with his own gun, possibly, accidentally or on purpose by his own hand, and possibly by his wife, who suspected him of infidelity. Parry's student and assistant, Albert Lord, published, in 1960, with Harvard University Press, The Singer of Tales, a book presenting the Parry-Lord oral-formulaic theory of oral composition.

Dundes applies the oral-formulaic theory to the Qur'an. Dundes' list of Qur'an formulae is overwhelming and, for the reader, exhausting. "What your right hand possesses" is a formula used repeatedly to refer to slaves. "Who is more wicked than he who invents a lie against Allah or denies His revelations?" is repeated ten times. Formulae attesting to the attributes of Allah are repeated dozens of times. "Allah is severe in retribution," "Allah is swift in reckoning," "Allah, if he pleases, can remove you and replace you with others in your stead," "Allah knows best," and variations of "Allah sees everything you do" are repeated multiple times. "Children of Israel" is repeated thirty-nine times. This formula is remarkable given that modern day Muslims and their supporters insist that Jews have no connection to Israel.

The Qur'an repeatedly tells Muslims to "enjoin good and forbid evil." Thus every Muslim has been deputized to carry out what he believes to be Allah's will; this provides justification for the kind of lone wolves who murdered Theo van Gogh and others. In contrast, unbelievers "enjoin evil and forbid good." Sinners might die at any time. In one formula, "in the morning they were found dead, face down, in their homes." In other formula, "Humiliating punishment awaits the unbelievers," and, "Neither their wealth nor their children will help them in the least against Allah. They shall be fuel for the fire." Unbelievers will be punished with "chains round their necks." Dundes comments on how formulae can be expressed in a variety of ways, sometimes as a statement, sometimes as a question. The chains idea can also be expressed as "they will be bound with chains." Sometimes one person speaks a formula, "Acquit us of our evil deeds" and sometimes another speaker voices the same idea. "I will acquit you of your evil deeds," or "He will acquit them of their evil deeds," or "Allah will acquit him of his evil deeds." Muslims in heaven are variously described. "They shall be decked with bracelets of gold, and arrayed in garments of fine green silk and rich brocade" (18:31); "They shall be decked with bracelets of gold and of pearls, and arrayed in garments of silk" (22:23); "They shall be decked with bracelets of gold and pearls, and arrayed in robes of silk" (35:33); and "They shall be arrayed in garments of fine green silk and rich brocade, and adorned with bracelets of silver" (76:21).

"Whole verses," Dundes writes, "consist of little else than formulas." For example, "In surah 39, the seventh verse includes: 'No soul shall bear another's burden. To your Lord shall you return and He will declare to you what you have done. He knows your innermost thoughts." Every sentence there is a formula that appears over and over in the Qur'an. Another example, "The fourth verse of surah 57. 'To Allah belongs the kingdom of the heavens and the earth. To Allah shall all things return. He causes the night to pass into the day and causes the day  to pass into the night. He has knowledge of the innermost thoughts of men.'" Again, every sentence here is a formula that is repeated over and over. "We find throughout the Qur'an formula piled upon formula in surah after surah."

Dundes, as was his wont, proves his point beyond doubt with page after page of formulae repeated over and over. "If one were to subtract all the oral formulas from the Qur'an, one would have an overall text reduced by as much as one-third of its present length, if not more." Dundes is just talking about formulae here, not whole narratives. The Qur'an repeats narratives multiple times as well, alluding to the Exodus story so frequently that, by one count, Moses is mentioned 155 times.

Can we conclude anything about the Qur'an's formulae? Yes, according to Dundes. "The simple principle would be that the more times a formula appears, the more significant the theme articulated in the formula should be regarded. Hence the diverse powers of Allah, the sharp division between believers and unbelievers, the dramatic difference between the joys of heaven and the horrors of hell, the fearsome nature of the Day of Judgment softened by the assurance of the promise of Resurrection, are all featured in numerous formulas."

After applying oral-formulaic theory to the Qur'an, Dundes moves on to the presence of folktales in the Qur'an. Dundes refers to tale types. Finnish folkorist Antti Aarne and American folklorist Stith Thompson, in the twentieth century, worked to systematize the world's folktales. Versions of Cinderella were told in China hundreds of years before versions appeared in Europe. How to organize all this material? Through the Stith-Thompson Tale Type index, that assigns numbers to similar tales. Cinderella, in this index, is 510A.

In the Qur'an, there is a version of tale type 766, a.k.a. "The Seven Sleepers." This story of Christians seeking refuge in a cave to avoid religious persecution is centuries older than the Qur'an. In early Christian versions and also in the Qur'an, the sleepers are accompanied by their dog, who sleeps with them. Dundes astutely notes that given Islam's hostility to dogs, it is likely that this detail reveals that the author had heard this story originally from Christians.

A second tale type appearing in the Qur'an is 759, "God's Justice Vindicated," or "The Angel and the Hermit." In Qur'an 18:65-82, a servant guides Moses on a trip. This servant performs what appear to be inexplicable and unjust acts. Later, he justifies these acts to Moses. For example, he kills a child. He explains to Moses why he did this. "His parents both are true believers, and we feared lest he should plague them with wickedness and unbelief. It was our wish that their Lord should grant them another in his place, a son more righteous and more filial." Dundes cites variations of this tale type in various cultures. He acknowledges that in the case of this particular tale, he cannot say which version came first, the one in the Qur'an, or the others he cites.

Dundes does not mention other previously existing folk material in the Qur'an, including the story of child Jesus making clay birds fly, a motif which appears in the Infancy Gospel of Thomas. The Infancy Gospel of Thomas is first mentioned circa 180 AD, over four hundred years before the Qur'an emerged.

In Qur'an 27:16-19, Solomon announces that he can understand the language of birds. Ants converse in his presence, and, understanding their speech, an amused Solomon laughs. Dundes identifies this as tale type 670, The Animal Languages. Dundes mentions a Buddhist version from the third century, again, predating the Qur'an by hundreds of years. Another version, also from the Indian subcontinent and also predating the Qur'an, involves a king who understands ants, and who laughs when overhearing their talk. In several other versions of this tale type, the person who understands animal languages laughs when overhearing, and understanding, a comment by a creature. The Qur'an version includes laughter. That laughter, consistent with previous versions of the tale from other cultures, but "one of the relatively rare occurrences of humor in the Qur'an," is like the dog in the sleepers story. The laughter, like the dog, is out of place in the Qur'an, but true to the original folkloric item. These clues suggest that whoever compiled the Qur'an acquired these tales through folklorically normal oral routes of transmission of folkloric material from one hearer and teller to another.

Dundes concludes that "Allah or the archangel Gabriel was seemingly well versed in the techniques of folkloristic oral transmission." Dundes quotes the above-mentioned Seyyed Hossein Nasr. As previously mentioned, in the Holland documentary, Nasr championed Islam's superiority as a source of superior ways of knowing. Nasr repeats that theme in the quote Dundes includes. "The formulae of the Qur’an, because they come from God, have a power which is not identical with what we learn from them rationally by simply reading and reciting them. They are rather like a talisman which protects and guides man." Of course reliance on talismans for protection and guidance is a widespread folk practice. Rigorous scholarship is something else again, and Dundes provides that with his exemplary rigor.

Danusha Goska is the author of God Through Binoculars: A Hitchhiker at a Monastery