Approaches to the Qur'an in early christian Arabic Texts ,750CE-1258 CE

How might early Christian Arabic texts aid contemporary research scholars / students of the Qur an? Within a century of the Prophet s death, Christians were writing in Arabic. Although various recensions of the Covenant of Umar prohibit Christians from teaching the Qur an to their children, this very prohibition indicates that Christians were, in fact, teaching the Qur an to their children - for grammatical or theological purposes. During Abbasid times, representatives from various theological and philosophical schools would be summoned to debate the merits of their respective religions on the basis of logic, rather than competing religious texts. In his Jadhwat al-Muqtabis, Ab Abd All h al-Humayd recounts the amazement of an Andalusian visitor to the caliphal majlis in 4th/10th century Baghdad, when he found that Jews and Christians, Shi a and Sunni, atheists and materialists were accorded equal respect in a debate session he attended. This spirit of free inquiry and open debate that shocked the Andalusian visitor to Baghdad is reflected in a number of Christian Arabic texts dating to the Abbasid period. Given the high degree of inter-confessional contact, and the presumed freedom of Christians from the dictates of normative Islamic thought, might early Christian Arabic discussions of the Qur an be mined in order the better to understand the history of the reception, if not the transmission, of the qur anic text?

This work is an initial exploration into the use of the Qur an in three such texts all from Melkite authors, the first Christians to write in Arabic. All texts date to the Abbasid caliphate - Paul of Antioch s Letter to Muslim friends; Theodore Abu Qurra s debate with members of al-Ma mun s entourage in a caliphal majlis; the unique manuscript Sinai Ar 434. The texts were chosen both because of their early provenance from the first Christian community to write in Arabic (the so-called Melkites), as well as for their relative dearth of gratuitous polemics against Islam. All three texts have received prior scholarly attention, upon which the current work builds (e.g. Mark Swanson s and Sidney Griffith s articles; Rifaat Ebied and David Thomas, Muslim-Christian polemic during the Crusades, Leiden:Brill, 2005; as well as Paul Khoury s 1964 Arabic edition and French translation of Paul s text; Paul Khoury s 2002 work on Christian tafsir of the Qur an from the eighth to the twelfth centuries; Jane Dammen McAuliffe s 1991 Qur anic Christians).

The qur anic passages employed by Paul, Theodore and the anonymous monk are divided into four categories and compared with interpretations from Islamic exegetical tradition. While many Christian Arabs today tend to speak only of the 2 books of God (kitabayn) meaning the Old and New Testament, early Arabophone Christians seemed willing to speak of the books of God (kutub Allah), and to include the Qur an in this category. These early Christian Arabs also tended to read qur anic discussions in the light of Christian theology, emphasizing aspects that confirmed a Christian understanding of Jesus divinity (parts of Q 4:171). They would ignore qur anic passages that refuted Christian doctrine, or would explain them away as an invention of the later umma something that could not have been in the original message that Muhammad had brought.

Contrary to some contemporary trends in orientalist scholarship, this study concludes that Christian Arabic texts should not be used as a reliable indicator of the textual history of the Qur an, since it is difficult to determine if a qur anic reference is a direct quotation, a paraphrase, or simply an allusion to an interpretation of a qur anic passage.