Creating the Qur’an by Stephen J. Shoemaker

Author:Stephen J. Shoemaker [Shoemaker, Stephen J.]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 9780520389045
Publisher: University of California Press
Published: 2022-07-26T00:00:00+00:00

MEMORY, MUHAMMAD’S TEACHINGS, AND THE QUR’AN

Let us then consider what the well-documented limitations of human memory should mean for how we think about the early history of the Qur’an. The Qur’an is generally believed by both Muslims and most modern scholars alike to be an exact and faithful transcript of the words that Muhammad taught. As F. E. Peters maintains, for instance, “our copy of the Qurʾān is, in fact, what Muhammad taught, and is expressed in his own words.” After Muhammad’s death and before their collection under ʿUthmān, these words were transmitted by men who “were convinced from the outset . . . that what they were hearing and noting ‘on scraps of leather, bone and in their hearts’ were not the teachings of a man but the ipsissima verba Dei and so they would have been scrupulously careful in preserving the actual wording.” Accordingly, Peters insists that one must recognize that “the Qurʾān is convincingly the words of Muhammad.”60 So also Rudi Paret insists that “We have no reason to assume that even a single verse in the entire Qur’an does not come from Muhammad himself.”61 Elsewhere Paret avers that the Qur’an “contains nothing but authentic sayings of the Prophet. The individual proclamations appear to have come down to us in an unfailingly verbatim transmission.”62 Angelika Neuwirth similarly maintains that the Qur’an must be understood as a “transcript” of Muhammad’s “prophetic communications.”63 Such pronouncements regarding the fidelity of the Qur’anic text to what Muhammad taught are not at all uncommon, and ultimately they would all appear to harken back to Nöldeke, who long ago proclaimed that “the Qur’an contains only authentic material.”64 Nevertheless, in light of what we have just seen about the limitations of human memory, is there any reason to imagine that such judgments could possibly be warranted, despite their prevalence, in critical scholarship on the Qur’an and early Islam?

If we assume Muhammad’s early followers to have been ordinary human beings without mnemonic superpowers, then we must accept that their memories of the words Muhammad spoke to them do not preserve “what Muhammad taught, and is expressed in his own words.” Such accuracy is altogether impossible, no matter how many times it may be asserted in the scholarly literature, unless someone were taking dictation in the moment. Within hours of hearing him speak, the listeners would already have forgotten most of the specific words he said, as the Ebbinghaus forgetting curve, a pillar of memory science, clearly indicates. When they later sought to retrieve memories of what they had heard, they would not have simply called up a faithful transcript from the archives of their memories. Instead, such recall involves the imaginative reconstruction and recomposition of the memory anew, based on some fragments that managed to make it into storage. But these fragments leave large gaps and must be supplemented by information drawn from “the relation of our attitude towards a whole active mass of organised past reactions or experience.”65 Perhaps a few months or years

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.