Indeed, in order to fully
appreciate the apocryphal status of the Qur’an, perhaps one must imagine how we
might regard this text today if Muhammad’s followers had been soundly defeated
by the Romans at Yarmuk and their movement slowly dissolved in the years
thereafter as the eschaton failed to arrive as anticipated. If we further
suppose that somehow the Qur’an had come into being by this time, as the
Islamic tradition effectively expects us to believe, and this text were the
main remnant of Muhammad’s religious movement, what would we make of it? Almost
certainly, I suspect, on the basis of its content and its relation to the
biblical tradition, we would identify if as a late ancient apocryphon and so
many other such compositions is that, like the Book of Mormon for example, a
religious group eventually elevated to a new scriptural authority. There is in
fact much in common between these two apocrypha, the Qur’an and the Book of
Mormon, so much so that in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century America
the comparison was frequently made in order to impugn the Book of Mormon. Yet
in more recent years, scholars of religious studies have studied the
similarities of these texts and their histories with more learned intent,
enabling the two texts to illuminate one another through comparison. Like the
Qur’an, as well as the biblical writings themselves, the Book of Mormon
contains “a variety of materials in different genres ranging from historical
narratives, legal codes, and moral injunctions to revelations, prophecies,
visions, and ecstatic poetry.” (Hardy, “Book of Mormon,” 136) All three
collections share the same generic diversity.
The Book of Mormon, for its
part, is an “intensely American book” that has often been described as “the New
World scripture” and “American scripture,” or an “American apocryphon.”
(Givens, The Book of Mormon, 125; Givens; By the Hand of Mormon,
6; Vogel and Metcalfe, American Apocrypha) As W. D. Davis notes, “its
substructure and its structures are in the Old Testament and the New Testament.
But it also reinterprets and accommodates or transfers ancient forms, in a very
remarkable way, to an American setting and mode,” so that is presents “the
Jewish-Christian tradition to an American setting and mode,” so that is
presents “the Jewish-Christian tradition in an American key.” The
territoriality of Judaism is reinterpreted by Americanizing it,” and sacred sites
from the biblical narrative are relocated onto American soil. (Davis, “Israel,
the Mormons, and the Land,” 89. See also Maffly-Kipp, American Scriptures,
xvii) The Book of Mormon is, as Laurie Maffly-Kipp describes it, “a sacred
drama of the Americas that correlated with biblical accounts of early human
history.” (Smith, Book of Mormon, xviii) If we were simply to substitute
Arabian for American in the quotations above, the same statements would apply
equally well to the Qur’an and early Islam. Thus, I would agree wholeheartedly
with Sinai’s characterization of the Qur’an “as a properly Arabic restatement
of the Biblical heritage.” (Sinai, “Eschatological Kerygma,” 254) It is, then,
a properly Arabic or Arabian apocryphon much as the Book of Mormon stands, as
others have noted, as a properly American apocryphon that restates the biblical
heritage in a distinctively American idiom. And just like the Book of Mormon,
this Arabian apocryphon would eventually come to be an Arabian scripture.
(Stephen J. Shoemaker, The Quest of the Historical Muhammad and Other
Studies on Formative Islam [Eugene, Oreg.: Cascade Books, 2024], 78-79)
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