Two Legal Problems Bearing on the Early History of the Qurʾān 1

The Qurʾān is generally supposed to have originated in a social, cultural and linguistic environment familiar to the early commentators, whose activities began shortly after Muhammad’s death and many of whom were natives of the two cities in which he had been active; yet they not infrequently seem to have forgotten the original meaning of the text. ² It is clear, for example, that they did not remember what Muhammad had meant by the expressions jizya ʿan yad, ³ al-ṣamad, ⁴ kalāla ⁵ or īlāf; indeed, the whole of Sūra v_2106 (Quraysh), in which the word īlāf occurs, was as opaque to them as it is to us; ⁶ and the same is true of the so-called ‘mysterious letters’. ⁷ Kalāla is a rather unusual case in that several traditions (attributed to ʿUmar) openly admit that the meaning of this word was unknown; ⁸ more commonly, the exegetes hide their ignorance behind a profusion of interpretations so contradictory that they can only be guesswork. “It might”, as Rosenthal observes, “seem an all too obvious and unconvincing argument to point to the constant differences of the interpreters and conclude from their disagreement that none of them is right. However, there is something to such an argument”. ⁹ There is indeed. Given that the entire exegetical tradition is characterized by a proliferation of diverse interpretations, it is legitimate to wonder whether guesswork did not play as great a role in its creation as did recollection; ¹⁰ but the tradition is not necessarily right even when it is unanimous. In this paper I shall first adduce an example of a Qurʾānic passage misunderstood by the exegetes without there being any disagreement whatsoever about the interpretation, and next discuss the exegetical memory loss with reference to the discontinuity between Qurʾānic legislation and Islamic law, of which I shall adduce another example.