Surah 19 Maryam in the Birmingham Manuscript
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INTRODUCTION
This paper is a précis of the larger paper examining the Birmingham Qur’an fragments, with this piece focusing on Surah 19 Maryam in the manuscript. In it, we suggest that the segment in the Birmingham fragment is attacking Zoroastrianism, not Christianity.
SURAH MARYAM IN THE BIRMINGHAM FRGAMENTS
The contents of Surah 19 Maryam verses 91-98 are these:
91. That ye ascribe unto the Beneficent a son,
92. When it is not meet for (the Majesty of) the Beneficent that He should choose a son.
93. There is none in the heavens and the earth but cometh unto the Beneficent as a slave.
94. Verily He knoweth them and numbereth them with (right) numbering.
95. And each one of them will come unto Him on the Day of Resurrection, alone.
96. Lo! those who believe and do good works, the Beneficent will appoint for them love.
97. And We make (this Scripture) easy in thy tongue, (O Muhammad) only that thou mayst bear good tidings therewith unto those who ward off (evil), and warn therewith the froward folk.
98. And how many a generation before them have We destroyed! Canst thou (Muhammad) see a single man of them, or hear from them the slightest sound?
Initially this could be taken as a criticism of the Christian doctrine of the divine filiation of Jesus. However, it must be remembered that the text is fragmentary. If we take the standard text, v35 might support this analysis: ‘It befitteth not (the Majesty of) Allah that He should take unto Himself a son. Glory be to Him! When He decreeth a thing, He saith unto it only: Be! and it is.’ Most definitely, Surah Maryam starts as a redaction of Christian apocrypha. However, in between the references to Jesus and the ayat present in the Birmingham fragment, we are treated to the story of Abraham, which in the Qur’anic redaction, presents him as rejecting his father’s gods, verses 41-49, which derive from Jewish apocryphal legends, Midrash Genesis Rabbah, third century AD, completed about the sixth century, and The Apocalypse of Abraham, It is dated c. 70 AD to the early second century, and so precedes the Qur’an.
The question is the identity of the pagan mushrikun – those who ‘associate’ other gods with Allah. Crone: states:
The first part of this article examines the Qurʾānic evidence; the second part deals with the well-known hypothesis that the pagan Allāh was a “high God” and tries to relate the Qurʾānic evidence to the late antique context. The Islamic tradition is excluded from both parts on the principle that we have to start by understanding the Qurʾān on the basis of information supplied by the book itself, as opposed to that of later readers, and to understand this information in the light of developments known to have preceded its formation rather than those engendered by the book itself.
We should note the identity of the group who Syriac Christians lambasted as ‘pagans’ – Zoroastrians:
… East Syrian texts commonly refer to Zoroastrians as ‘pagans’ and Zoroastrianism as ‘paganism,’ making use of the word ḥanpā and its derivatives: see, e.g., History of Karka d-Beth Slokh, p. 514, ln. 21 (ḥanpē, ‘pagans,’ as Zoroastrians) (ed. Bedjan, AMS, vol. 2); Babai the Great, History of George the Priest, p. 435, ln. 15 (ḥanpāyā, ‘pagan,’ used adjectivally to refer to George’s pre-Christian, Persian/Zoroastrian name); p. 436, ln. 3 (ḥanputā, ‘paganism,’ used to identify George’s sister’s name while she was still ‘in paganism,’ i.e., before she was a Christian — cp. with p. 564, ln. 6); p. 523, lnn. 7, 17 (a Zoroastrian as a ḥanpā, ‘pagan’); Martyrdom of Gregory Pirangushnasp (ed. Bedjan, Histoire de Mar-Jabalaha), p. 347, ln. 8 (ḥanpē, ‘pagans,’ as Zoroastrians), p. 349, ln. 2 (ḥanputā, ‘paganism,’ as Zoroastrianism), etc.
We need to remember that apart from the Persian Empire itself, Zoroastrians were to be found in Eastern Arabia, including Arab converts. The name ‘Zoroaster’ is the Greek form of Zarathushtra:
The Greek form Zoroastres was first used by Xanthos of Lydia in the mid-fifth century CE, and was the base for subsequent European versions of the name until Nietzsche popularized the Iranian form Zarathushtra. Some adherents choose to refer to their religion by the ancient Iranian terms Mazdayasna (‘worship of Ahura Mazda’), daena Mazdayasni (‘the religion of Mazda worship’) or daena vanguhi. This latter term, usually translated as ‘the good religion’, occurs in the Gathas, the oldest texts of the religion (Gathas 5.53.4).
So, what did Zarathustra teach about Ahura Mazda? He did not seem to teach monotheism, but he did display Ahura Mazda as the greatest deity: ‘Zoroaster… in a startling departure from accepted beliefs proclaimed Ahura Mazda to be the one uncreated God, existing eternally, and Creator of all else that is good, including all other beneficent divinities.’ Elsewhere Boyce presents the essence of divine ontology in Zoroastrianism: ‘For Zarathushtra God was Ahura Mazda, who, he taught, had created the world and all that is good in it through his Holy Spirit, Spenta Mainyu, who is both his active agent and yet one with him, indivisible and yet distinct.’
Note that Surah 20:8 states: ‘Allah! There is no God save Him. His are the most beautiful names.’ The issue of Allah’s names occurs elsewhere in the Qur’an. They are equated with his attributes. This is only partly true in the Bible, but there is a clear parallel in Zoroastrianism. We may learn something about the attributes of Ahura Mazda from this section in the Hymn to Ahura Mazda, the Ohrmazd Yasht:
5. Then Zarathushtra said: ‘Reveal unto me that name of thine, O Ahura Mazda! that is the greatest, the best, the fairest, the most effective, the most fiend-smiting, the best-healing, that destroyeth best the malice of Daêvas and Men;
6. That I may afflict all Daêvas and Men; that I may afflict all Yâtus and Pairikas; that neither Daêvas nor Men may be able to afflict me; neither Yâtus nor Pairikas.’
7. Ahura Mazda replied unto him: ‘My name is the One of whom questions are asked, O holy Zarathushtra!
‘My second name is the Herd-giver
‘My third name is the Strong One
‘My fourth name is Perfect Holiness.
‘My fifth name is All good things created by Mazda, the offspring of the holy principle.
‘My sixth name is Understanding;
‘My seventh name is the One with understanding.
‘My eighth name is Knowledge;
‘My ninth name is the One with Knowledge.
8. ‘My tenth name is Weal;
‘My eleventh name is He who produces weal.
‘My twelfth name is AHURA (the Lord).
‘My thirteenth name is the most Beneficent.
‘My fourteenth name is He in whom there is no harm.
‘My fifteenth name is the unconquerable One.
‘My sixteenth name is He who makes the true account.
‘My seventeenth name is the All-seeing One.
‘My eighteenth name is the healing One.
‘My nineteenth name is the Creator.
‘My twentieth name is MAZDA (the All-knowing One).
This presents a deity who is the omniscient and powerful Creator. The twelfth name is parallel to the way the Qur’an often presents Allah by the title ‘Lord’, which is clearly honorific rather than a translation of YHWH. His thirteenth name is interesting in that ar-Rahman in the Qur’an is often translated ‘beneficent’. Crone refers to this name several times in her paper on the Qur’anic pagans:
God reassured the Messenger that no such gods existed: “Ask the messengers whom We sent before you: have We set up gods to be worshipped apart from al-Raḥmān?” (43:45).
But the Messenger takes the language of procreation literally. “They say, al-Raḥmān has begotten offspring (ittakhadha waladan)” (21:26; cf. 43:81; 19:88, 91f.).
Most references to this belief take the form of denials that the lesser deities have the power to do what is expected of them. “Should I adopt gods apart from Him?”, a believer from a vanished city asks, adding that “if al-Raḥmān wants to inflict some harm on me, their intercession (shafāʿa) will not be any use, nor will they be able to save me” (36:23).
The alleged offspring of al-Raḥmān are just servants raised to high honour who act by His command and offer no intercession, except for those who have found favour (with Him) (21:26–28).
“If al-Raḥmān had wanted, we would not have worshipped them” (43:20).
She addresses this in more detail in section 10 Allāh and al-Raḥmān:
Though the Messenger and his opponents worshipped the same God under the name of Allāh, the modern literature often says that the Messenger also knew Him by a name with which the pagans were not familiar, namely al-Raḥmān, implying that his concept of God was shaped by additional monotheist ideas which the pagans did not share. But both sides call Him al-Raḥmān in the Qurʾān.
Crone goes on to observe about the interchangeability of the terms both to the monotheists and the pagans:
That God and al-Raḥmān were interchangeable to both sides is also suggested by the fact that nothing is said about the latter which is not said about the former as well, whether by the Messenger or by the pagans. This does not completely solve the problem, for elsewhere the Messenger is instructed to say, “Call upon Allāh or call upon al-Raḥmān: by whatever name you (sg.) call, His are the beautiful names” (17:110).
Once we understand that Arabian Zoroastrians would have rendered the Avestan ‘Beneficent’ (Spenta) by the Arabic al-Raḥmān, it becomes clear why both sides could use the name. This helps us understand the verses in the Birmingham fragment in Surah 19:
91. That ye ascribe unto the Beneficent a son,
92. When it is not meet for (the Majesty of) the Beneficent that He should choose a son.
93. There is none in the heavens and the earth but cometh unto the Beneficent as a slave.
Rather than seeing all such references as being to Christian Christology, we should consider what Zen-Avesta scripture of the Zoroastrians states:
15 (49). O Maker of the material world, thou Holy One! What shall be the place of that man who has carried a corpse alone [3]?
Ahura Mazda answered: ‘It shall be the place on this earth wherein is least water and fewest plants, whereof the ground is the cleanest and the driest and the least passed through by flocks and herds, by Fire, the son of Ahura Mazda, by the consecrated bundles of baresma, and by the faithful.’
The reference to ‘Fire’ is Atar, the son of Ahura Mazda. Dhalla comments about this entity: ‘The Iranian word for fire as well as for the Yazata presiding over fire is Atar… Atar, or Fire, is most frequently called the son of Ahura Mazda in the Younger Avestan texts. The devout hunger in heart to reach Mazda through him as a mediary.’ Hence, in many cases in the Qur’an, and probably this was the original meaning, the denunciations of the idea of the (singular) ‘son of Allah’ refer to Zoroastrian Atar rather the Jesus of Christianity.
In Zoroastrianism, Heaven and Earth were deities, as well as being cosmic spheres: ‘…the sun-yazata, Asman, spirit of the sky... The earth yazata herself, Zam…’ In regard to the physical sky and earth, Ahura Mazda was held to be their creator: ‘One Gathic passage (2.44.3–7) delineates Ahura Mazda’s generation of the universe… first asha;then the course of the sun and stars, and the cycle of the moon; the earth below and the sky above…’ Related to this, is the concept of the Seven spheres:
The Zoroastrians originally distinguished four spheres: (1) stars, (2) moon, (3) sun, (4) paradise, to which the “station of the clouds” is sometimes added as a fifth and lowest… The later scheme of six spheres (or seven, with the “clouds”). is due partly to juggling with numbers (six Amasa Spantas, seven with Ohrmazd, etc…)
In the light of this, we can see that Surah 19:93: ‘There is none in the heavens and the earth but cometh unto the Beneficent as a slave’ is a polemic against the Zoroastrian idea that Heaven and Earth were deities.
CONCLUSION
All of this suggests that what is being attacked at the end of Surah 19 is not Christianity, but rather Zoroastrianism. This would make sense in the historical context of the Persian-Roman (Byzantine) war and the Persian conquest of Jerusalem and Palestine. Surah Ar-Rum 30 displays the pro-Byzantine view of the Qur’an, and that the polemic against paganism should be understood as an anti-Persian/anti-Zoroastrian diatribe.