Fables of the Ancients? Folklore in the Qur'an by Alan Dundes
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
I don't read your posts as regularly as I'd like (one get pulled in so many directions!), but I always really enjoy and get something from them. Best regards!
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