The later Muslim commentary literature, and common parlance down to the present, alleges that the Quran employs the word islām to refer to the specific faith preached by the prophet Muhammad. An influential article once asked, “What did Muhammad mean when he called his religion ‘Islam’?”Footnote 2 The great commentator Muḥammad ibn Jarīr Ṭabarī interpreted the verse “I have approved islām for you as your religion” (The Table 5: 3) to mean that God wanted people to surrender to the laws and rituals he had revealed through Muhammad.Footnote 3 The whole range of Quran verses in which the term features, however, do not appear to use it in precisely this way, and there is some reason to question whether it has been fully understood as a technical term. For instance, the Quran depicts a beleaguered Noah, a repentant drowning Pharaoh, a contrite Queen of Sheba, and the disciples of Jesus as all following islām many ages before the birth of Muhammad.
The verbal noun islām derives from the form IV Arabic verb aslama (to surrender, submit, acquiesce, accept), and the latter also gave rise to the active participle, muslim.Footnote 4 Fred Donner has argued that islām in the Quran does not appear to be the name of Muhammad's religion, contrary to what Baneth assumed and, indeed, that the custom of so designating it came much later in history.Footnote 5 I concur, and will argue that between the recitation of the Quran by the Prophet Muhammad roughly 610–632 ce and the production of the first Muslim religious texts in the eighth century under the Umayyad dynasty, a linguistic shift took place that limited the meaning of muslim and islām to the religion of Muhammad. The technical term in the Quran itself for followers of Muhammad's message is “the faithful” (alladhīna āmanū), although it does subsume them under the broad category of islām, just as it does members of other monotheistic religions. Emran El-Badawi has argued that a Syriac Christian notion of the “prophetic tradition” (mashlmānūtā, an Aramaic cognate of the Arabic islām) is relevant to the Quranic usage, and I concur, though I think the antecedents of this notion are broader yet.Footnote 6 I will propose here, following on from El-Badawi's suggestion, that a fuller understanding of the term islām can be gained from seeing the Quran as a document of Eastern Roman late antiquity.Footnote 7
Abraham
The Quran characterized Abraham and Ishmael as adhering to islām, which clearly therefore does not denote the much later faith of Muhammad. The Cow 2: 126–36 shows the patriarch Abraham with his son Ishmael laying the foundations of the Kaaba in Mecca.Footnote 8 Q. 2: 128 depicts the two of them saying, “Lord, make us submissive to you (muslimayn laka) and make our descendants a nation that has submitted to you (ummah muslimah laka). Show us how to carry out our rituals and forgive us. You are, in truth, the forgiving, the compassionate”.
It is important to note that here the active participle takes a preposition and an oblique object. Until recently, Arabic linguistics paid little attention to the difference between simple verbs and phrasal ones, an important distinction in English linguistics. We drop a glass but drop in on a friend.Footnote 9 Where the added preposition is key to the meaning, the ensemble is called an idiomatic phrasal verb. I hold that the simple verb aslama needs to be differentiated from the phrasal verb aslama li. Aslama li always takes an oblique object and invariably means “to submit to”. In contrast, the simple verb aslama can be transitive or intransitive, and, I hold, has a wider range of meanings.Footnote 10
The abstract noun islām derives from the simple verb rather than the phrasal one, and perhaps for that reason does not seem to bear the meaning of “submission”. It perhaps occurs for the first time in the late Meccan chapter, The Groups 39: 22: “As for those whose hearts God has opened to islām, they are bathed in a light from their lord. But woe to those whose hearts are hardened against the mention of God! They are in manifest error.” One problem with reading islām here as “submission” is that God is the agent, not the believer. God would have to be seen as having imposed submission on these individuals, which logically speaking is no kind of submission. Moreover, the two lines of the verse are parallel, with those whose hearts have been opened to islām opposed to those whose hearts have been hardened against the mention (dhikr) of the divine, suggesting that the two words are synonyms. “Submission” is not a synonym of “mention”. But if islām means “the tradition of monotheism”, then the parallelism of “tradition” and “mention” would make sense. This case is strengthened by the Quran's identification of islām with the “word” of Abraham (see below), since word and mention are exact matches. Islām, then, seems to be wide-ranging in its signification, meaning not just submission but also recognition, mention, word and tradition. There is a late antique concept with precisely the same unusual contours. Moreover, there is at least some evidence of a connection.
Levantine Arabic
John bar Penkaye, a Christian writing in the late seventh century under Umayyad rule, spoke of the authorities enforcing a tradition (mashlmānūtā) of Muhammad.Footnote 11 I propose that he was translating into Syriac the Arabic phrase, islāmu Muḥammadin, and that he heard the latter from seventh-century believers in the Quran. A century later, it had become the common Syriac Christian term for Islam.Footnote 12 The Syriac word derives from the trilateral Semitic root shlm, a cognate of the Arabic slm from which aslama comes. Late antique Christian authors used the Syriac term to mean tradition or a teaching that is passed on.Footnote 13 It can mean “scripture” itself. Cyriacus of Nisibus composed a work on the tradition (mashlmānūtā) of Paul. Rabbis spoke of the Mosaic mashlmānūtā or tradition, and also made the term synonymous with the Mishna, the oral legal commentary, and hence an ongoing, living tradition.Footnote 14 Dictionaries of Syriac give the verb from which this noun derives a wide range of meanings, including handing down, capitulating, betraying, succeeding, and commenting.Footnote 15
Linguists use the term “loanshift” to describe the process in bilingual societies whereby a word in one language takes on a new meaning or connotation because of the influence of a word in another language.Footnote 16 The diverse meanings of the Syriac mashlmānūtā derive from it being a loanshift of the Greek term παράδοσις (paradosis), which has a similarly wide range of meanings having to do both with surrender and with the passing on or acceptance of a tradition. I propose that John bar Penkaye shows us that by the late 600s when he was writing, believers in the Quran had begun calling their religion the Islam of Muhammad and that they meant by that “the tradition of Muhammad”. Had bar Penkaye written in Greek he would have spoken of the paradosis of Muhammad. If they did speak of “the tradition of Muhammad”, Arabs of the Middle Umayyad period appear to have diverged in their usage from that of the Quran, where islām or paradosis is not associated with a particular religious tradition.
The schema of Alan Race and John Hick with regard to the way religions view the prospects for salvation of other faiths consists of three possibilities: exclusivism, inclusivism and pluralism. Exclusivists hold that only adherents of their own religion will be saved. Inclusivists assert that they have the whole truth, but some other religious communities might have some of the truth (this is the position of the Vatican II council in Roman Catholicism). Pluralists hold that many valid paths lead to paradise. The chapter of The Family of Amram at one point (2: 135) complains about the exclusivist soteriology of the contemporary biblical communities: “They say: ‘Become Jews and Christians and be guided’. No, the word (millah) of Abraham, the pious gentile. He was no polytheist.” The Quran contrasts this exclusivist soteriology to the word of Abraham, which appears to be more or less synonymous with Abraham's islām or recognition of the one God. Millah is how later scribes vowelled in Arabic the Aramaic loan, melt ā, literally meaning “word”. This concept was in turn underlain by the Greek Logos.Footnote 17
The wide range of meanings of Logos included the cosmic principle of reason generating the universe and a religious path to that truth. The early Christian thinker Justin Martyr put forward the Logos as an agent of religious pluralism. He responded to those Roman critics who berated Christians as hardhearted for dooming to hellfire all human beings born before Jesus of Nazareth. Justin Martyr held that Christ is the Word or Logos, the principle of universal reason “of whom every race of men were partakers; and those who lived reasonably are Christians”.Footnote 18 They included ancient Greek philosophers such as Heraclitus and Socrates as well as the patriarch Abraham. In contrast, the first-century ce Jewish philosopher Philo spoke of the Logos of Abraham himself, which he described as a God-given combination of eloquence and faith.Footnote 19 The Quran in this passage rejects the idea that salvation is exclusively limited to those who believe in Moses and the Torah, or in Jesus and the Gospel. Rather, adoption of the monotheistic word of Abraham suffices, and Judaism, Christianity and the religion of Muhammad are all manifestations of it. That the Quran deploys a Greek concept, Logos, via its Aramaic loanshift, strengthens the argument that its use of islām might also be underlain by Aramaic and Greek technical terms.
It is even possible that among the Arabic-speakers of Syria, Palestine and Transjordan the Arabic islām had for centuries been used informally to translate paradosis, and that millah or kalimah (the Arabic for “word”) had rendered the Logos. It seems likely that Greek, as Fergus Millar maintained, functioned as the urban standard in the late Roman Near East of the fifth and sixth centuries.Footnote 20 Greek co-existed in the Levant with Aramaic dialects, but Arabic speakers in Syria and Transjordan had their own traditions of interacting with Greek. They had lived in the Eastern Roman empire, under Roman rule or on its peripheries, since the 106 ce conquests of Trajan. The Petra papyri, discovered in the early 1990s and now published in five volumes, contain correspondence between the years 537 and 593, pertaining to an elite Arabic-speaking family that used Greek for formal purposes. Palmyra had a longstanding Arabic-speaking minority. The Jafnid Phylarch al-Mundhir III had property in Bostra, and his predecessor Ghassān had a base in Damascus. The city of Gerasa in late antiquity conceived of itself as “a Greek city of Arabian ethnos”, where inscriptions show that alongside Dionysos, “the Arabian deity” was worshipped and where the civic council strove to integrate those called “Arabs” and Greek speakers. Arabic-speaking sedentary Christians maintained a church in the town of Zebed south of Aleppo, which bears an early sixth-century inscription honouring God (al-ilāh/theos) in Arabic, Syriac, and Greek. Archaeologists have even discovered bilingual Arabic and Greek Bedouin inscriptions.Footnote 21 Hoyland has concluded that “Arabophone Christianity was a lot more developed than has previously been thought”. He adds, “places like Najran, Hira, Petra, Nessana and Jabiya were home to substantial communities of Arabic-speaking Christians”.Footnote 22
In the sixth century, the Arabic-speakers of the southern Transjordan and eastern Syria only left a few simple rock inscriptions in that language. They almost certainly, however, had already developed a fairly rich vocabulary. As they adopted Christianity, they would have needed Arabic technical terms for theology and homilies.Footnote 23 The educated used Greek and Syriac for these purposes, but the large communities of Arabophone Christians in Transjordan and Syria over centuries would have developed their own neologisms and culture.Footnote 24 We see this process of translation and appropriation from sophisticated Greek works in other vernaculars, such as Coptic in Egypt.Footnote 25 It is striking that a key theological term in the Quran such as “salvation” (najāh) (40: 41), equivalent to the Greek σωτηρία (sōtēría), has no Aramaic or Hebrew cognate, and indeed is only attested in Ugaritic and Epigraphic South Arabian among Semitic languages. Both the Arabic root njw and the Greek sōzein have originally to do with “escape”, whereas the Aramaic Peshitta version of the New Testament translates sōtēría as “life”, suggesting that the Quranic usage is a loanshift directly from the Greek.Footnote 26
I am suggesting that Quranic Arabic theological vocabulary, unlike its grammar, did not originate in the pagan backwater of the Hejaz but among Arabophone citizens and foederati (military allies) of the Eastern Roman Empire. I propose that Hejazi long-distance merchants were more extensively embedded in the culture of the Roman Near East than the later Muslim sources usually admit, and that the cultural influence of the Graecophone Eastern Roman Empire reached more deeply into the Hejaz and Arabia than has typically been credited.Footnote 27 Either Christian Arab preachers of the sixth century never wrote their sermons down in their own language or any such writing did not survive. We first encounter their vocabulary set in the Quran itself, after it had developed orally for hundreds of years in the north.Footnote 28
Paradosis in Greek philosophy
Paradosis, or tradition, was an important idea in pagan, Platonic, Orphic, and Stoic contexts. It later took on significance for Jewish writers such as Josephus and for a galaxy of Christian thinkers. That Arabic words in the Quran have been shaped by influences from other languages has long been recognized, but little attention has been given to the Greek context save in obvious loanwords such as Iblis (devil), from diabolos. With regard to islām and paradosis I am proposing that the richly textured meanings of the latter came to inflect this word.
The Greek word paradosis, i.e. “tradition” or “teaching”, can refer to the act of passing on a tradition or to the content of the tradition itself. The related verb παραδίδωμι (paradidōmi) can mean both “to hand over” and “to hand down”, as well as “to surrender, give up”. The complex of meanings attached to this word, both active and passive and both transitive and intransitive, make it an unusually capacious term in late antique paganism, Judaism and Christianity. Everett Ferguson divided its semantic field into the active and the passive.Footnote 29 As a transitive verb paradidōmi can mean to hand over an object, to betray something or someone, or to hand down a tradition. As an intransitive verb, it can mean to surrender or acquiesce. The derived noun, paradosis, can mean anything from an item of information to sacred law and from the apostolic tradition in Christianity to heretical Gnostic teaching. That the Arabic can be mapped so closely onto this cluster of Greek meanings is strong evidence for a connection. You have a verb (aslama) that can be intransitive and then means to surrender or acquiesce, or can be transitive and then means to hand over. You have a derived noun (islām) that, I maintain, refers to a religious tradition.
The range of meanings of paradosis can be seen in classical and late antique Greek authors. Thucydides (Histories 3.53.1) said of the capitulation of the Plataeans to Sparta that they admitted, “we surrendered (παράδοσιν)” the city. In contrast, a passage in Plato's Laws (7.803a–803b) uses the word in the sense of the transmission of a tradition. After a discussion of the laws that should regulate society, especially with regard to the social and ritual use of music, the mysterious Athenian who leads this dialogue says, “We have next to discuss the question of the teaching and imparting (διδασκαλία και παράδοσις/ didaskalia and paradosis) of these subjects – how, by whom, and when each of them should be practiced”.Footnote 30 The “teaching and tradition” of ancient Greece pertained to the transmission of laws governing worship and society, and the shaping of the individual soul.
We also find the term in the more concrete realm of ancient Greek devotions. The Eleusinian mysteries dedicated to Demeter went on for ten days in September. On the eighth day, the hierophant (high priest and spiritual guide) admitted the worshippers into a brilliantly illuminated temple, recited for them the myth of Demeter, and allowed them to see “certain relics and amulets” that they touched, kissed or tasted while repeating a formula. These acts of worship were called the tradition of the sacred objects (παράδοσις των ἱερόν / paradosis tōn hierōn).Footnote 31
Another sense of the word in ancient Greek philosophy was the final stage of the publication of an author's manuscript. When the work, having been made available to the public, began being passed on from generation to generation, this stage was known as paradosis.Footnote 32 At this point the work had become “a tradition”. It had been both “surrendered” to the ages and “transmitted” to them.
The word retained its importance in the Roman Empire period. The Platonist Theon of Smyrna (fl. 100 ce) taught that the initiation into philosophy had five steps. The first was purification. The second was the transmission (paradosis) of doctrine. The third was revelation via a vision (epopteia). The fourth was teaching new devotees. The fifth was union with God's nature (homoiosis).Footnote 33 Likewise, Plutarch quoted the Stoic Chrysippus to the effect that the highest teaching concerns the gods and “the discourse concerning the Gods ought to be the last; wherefore also the traditions (paradoseis) concerning this have been styled” the ultimate mystery.Footnote 34
In the fifth century ce, one of the last major known pagan Platonists, Proclus Lycaeus (412–485), in discussing the nature of matter in his commentary on Plato's Timaeus, instanced “the tradition [paradosis] of the Egyptians”. He added, that it “is probable therefore, that Plato derived from Hermes an opinion of this kind concerning matter”. Thus, by the paradosis of the Egyptians here, Proclus meant the philosophical teachings of Thoth (identified by the Greeks as Hermes Trismegestus), which he believed were transmitted to Plato.Footnote 35
The New Testament
The verb paradidōmi and its derived nouns occur in the New Testament primarily with the sense of entrusting a tradition to someone, to hand over or to surrender something or someone, or to betray someone. The noun paradosis itself is used in two distinct ways in the New Testament. Paul and other authors view the apostolic tradition that is passed on through Christian communities as essential to the new faith. In contrast, in the four Gospels, paradosis is typically used to refer to the oral traditions about the Hebrew Bible and Jewish law transmitted and studied by the Pharisees, of which the Sadducees disapproved.Footnote 36 Thus, in Matthew 15: 2 the Pharisees notice that Jesus’ disciples eat their food without performing ablutions, and accost him about this departure from the law as they understand it: “Why do your disciples break the tradition of the elders (tēn paradosin tōn presbyterōn)? For they do not wash their hands before they eat”. In relating the same incident, Mark 7: 5–8 has Jesus rebuff them, saying, “You abandon the commandment of God and hold to human tradition (tēn paradosin tōn anthrōpōn)”. The word is used in a different way in the description of Jesus on the cross in John 19: 30: “When Jesus had received the wine, he said, ‘It is finished.’ Then he bowed his head and gave up his spirit (paredōken to pneuma)”.
Paul uses the noun in the sense of the traditions of Judaism in Galatians 1: 14, “I advanced in Judaism beyond many among my people of the same age, for I was far more zealous for the traditions (paradoseōn) of my ancestors”. The ancestors to which he refers here include monotheists like Abraham. In other letters of Paul, or those attributed to him, the term paradosis takes on a positive connotation. Thus, 1 Corinthians 11: 2 says, “I commend you because you remember me in everything and maintain the traditions (paradoseis) just as I handed them on (paredōke) to you”.Footnote 37 Similarly, 2 Thessalonians 2: 15 has, “So then, brothers and sisters, stand firm and hold fast to the traditions (paradoseis) that you were taught by us, either by word of mouth or by our letter”. It is this sense of the apostolic tradition in the Pauline letters that would become the most powerful connotation for paradosis in early Christianity.
Islām in the Quran
Given that the late antique Syriac rendering of paradosis is mashlmānūtā, I propose in turn that the cognate Arabic islām at least sometimes meant “tradition” of some sort and also translates paradosis. That is, the Quran conceives of monotheism as a perennial and ecumenical tradition, in which Jews, Muslims and other monotheists all participated.Footnote 38 It can be extra-scriptural, deriving from direct inspiration from God (as noted, in the Quran the pagan queen of Sheba and Jesus’ apostles both adopt it because of such direct inspiration). It can also be transmitted by scripture, as with the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament.
Let me begin with a verse that I think makes the meaning of the term especially clear. In The Ranks 61: 6, the Quran criticizes Jews for rejecting later prophets: “And when Jesus the son of Mary said to the children of Israel, I am the messenger of God to you, confirming the Torah that you possess, and giving good tidings of a messenger who will come after me, called ‘the Praised One.’ But when he came to them with clear signs, they said, ‘That is manifest sorcery’.” The Quran then adds, “And who does a greater wrong than one who fabricates lies about God, even while God is calling him to islām? And God never guides evildoers.” Note that Jesus is depicted as calling the adherents of Second Temple Judaism to islām. It makes no sense to translate islām here as submission to God, since God's existence and authority are not at issue – the Quran recognizes that Jews in the time of Jesus worshipped the one God. Rather, it implies that first-century Jews, by rejecting Jesus, declined the summons to the fullness of the serial prophetic tradition (and here Jesus not only announces himself but points to a future successor).
In The Family of Amram 3: 81, the Quran describes God as calling all future humans together and asking them if they would accept each new Messenger that God sent. These unborn generations agreed, saying “We affirm it”.Footnote 39 By rejecting Jesus and then Muhammad, it is implied, the Jews in 61: 6–7 broke this covenant of the prophets. They partake in only part of the prophetic tradition (islām), inasmuch as these monotheists follow Moses and other Hebraic prophets, but do not accept the complete tradition. The Quran appears to consider it a venal rather than a mortal sin for a member of a valid religion not to accept the whole line of prophets, so that righteous Jews and Christians who remain in their religions can still be granted entry into paradise despite being at least somewhat in the wrong. The Quran is inclusivist with regard to doctrine, holding that it has the whole truth of monotheism and that the revelation through the Prophet Muhammad is an essential continuation of the Abrahamic tradition, and that past religions have forgotten some essentials of prophetic monotheism. It is, however, pluralist with regard to salvation, accepting many monotheistic faiths as paths to salvation.Footnote 40
In the late Meccan chapter, Cattle 6: 125, the Quran complains that the “criminals” in charge of most cities demanded to be given what the prophets were given before they will accept Muhammad's message. It compares these arrogant urban notables to mountain-climbers who get into thin air: “When God wants to guide someone, he opens his heart to islām, and when he wishes to lead astray, he makes his breast narrow, tight, as if he were climbing up into the sky. Thus, God lays disgrace on those who do not believe.” Here, as in The Groups 39: 22 discussed above, the active figure is God, who is revealing a possibility to human beings.
In The Pilgrimage 22: 78, accepting the tradition is associated with Abraham, but also with Muhammad: “Strive strenuously for the sake of God. He chose you and has laid no hardship on you in religion. It is the Logos (millah) of your father Abraham. He named you monotheists (muslimīn) aforetime, so that the messenger might bear witness to this for you, and you might bear witness to the people. So pray and give charity regularly. Hold fast to God. He is your lord, the best of patrons and the best of succorers.” Here, Abraham himself is depicted as coining the term muslim, to describe one who subscribes to his primal Word (millah). Ages after Abraham, The Pilgrimage 22: 78 says, Muhammad bore witness to this same Logos, and, it is implied, was enabled to do so because Abraham began the tradition or paradosis. The Quran views the Logos of Abraham as a universal monotheistic principle at the heart of each of the true religions.
The Family of Amram 3: 19 says, “According to God, religion (dīn) is islām. Those who had been given scripture only differed out of covetousness, after knowledge came to them. God is quick in calling to account anyone who denies the verses of God”. Again, the issue addressed by this verse is not the oneness of God or submission to him. Rather, the Quran is saying that in principle, Jews, Christians and Muhammad's followers all share in the monotheistic tradition and so participate in authentic religion, in implicit contrast to the false religion of polytheists. They therefore ought not to quarrel with one another over the details, since they share in a common core. The difference is that Muhammad's Believers recognized Judaism and Christianity as participating in the Abrahamian tradition whereas some members of the previous religions denied that recognition to the newer teaching. The Quran in 3: 19 has brought together a Persian and a Greek concept. From Middle Persian it derives the word dēn, which came to mean “a religion”.Footnote 41 (It should not be confused with the Semitic word dīn, meaning judgment or service, which is also used by the Quran). In 3: 19 the Quran is not saying that Muhammad's religion is called Islam and is the only true faith.Footnote 42 Nor is the verse saying that Muhammad's is the true and full islām, which the previous religions foreshadowed and to which they are ex post facto subordinated, which is how triumphalist Muslims read the verse.Footnote 43 It is saying that the monotheistic paradosis goes back to Abraham, and that subsequent prophets all preached a version of it, even if their adherents decline to recognize this unity (cf. 3:84, which says God makes “no distinction” among the prophets). The Cow 3: 20 goes on to mention “those given scripture”, i.e. the Jews and the Christians, along with a group I would gloss as “gentile monotheists” (ummiyy ū n), and Muhammad's Believers.Footnote 44 It says that those who have “acquiesced” (aslama) will have been guided. The Quran promised salvation to a similar group of four religions in The Cow 2: 62: “Those who believed, and the Jews, and the Christians, and the Sabians, and whoever has believed in God and the Last Day and performed good works, they shall have their reward with their Lord.” This verse likely enumerates the basic characteristics of the prophetic paradosis or tradition as the Quran understands it: Faith in the one God, acceptance of the Judgment Day, and good works.
Note that the standard phrase used by the Quran to refer to Muhammad's community is “those who have believed”. This phrase may be a calque on the similar Greek usage in Christianity, for instance, Galatians 3: 7–9: “So, you see, those who believe (hοἱ ek pisteōs) are the descendants of Abraham. And the scripture, foreseeing that God would justify the Gentiles by faith, declared the gospel beforehand to Abraham, saying, ‘All the Gentiles shall be blessed in you.’ For this reason, those who believe (hοἱ ek pisteōs) are blessed with Abraham who believed” (emphasis added). Of course, the Quran recognizes Jews and Christians as having been marked by faith, as well, and āmana (to believe, have faith) is not exclusively used for those who accept the Quran. The full phrase “those who have believed”, however, is a technical term for Muhammad's flock.
The Quran portrays pagans as rejecting the prophetic paradosis in favour of a pantheon. The Family of Amram 3:85 remonstrates with them, “Whoever desires a religion (dīn) other than islām, it will never be accepted from him, and that one will be among the losers in the hereafter”. The following verse, 3: 86, makes it clear the Quran is here speaking of apostates who reverted to paganism. In 3: 85, the two terms are clearly related but unequal in their semantic reach. All islām is religion but not all religion is islām. Monotheists follow a religion that is characterized by islām but pagans do not. Muslim commentators who restricted the meaning of al-islam in this verse to the religion of Muhammad missed the universal character of the term. It is associated here with salvation, which as we just saw, the Quran grants to all righteous monotheists (2: 62).
Given that islām characterizes more than one historical faith community, that it means “prophetic tradition of monotheism” makes the most sense. The last part of The Table 5: 3 condemns the pagans in the voice of God: “Today the pagans have despaired of your religion; therefore, do not fear them, but fear me. Today I have perfected your religion for you, and I have completed my blessing on you, and I have approved islām as your religion. But whoever is constrained by hunger and does not purposely intend to sin – God is All-forgiving, All-Compassionate.” As Donner argues, it is unlikely that this verse is speaking of the religion brought by Muhammad in particular.Footnote 45 Even in the Abbasid period, Ṭabarī noted that a logical objection had been raised to the reading of islām here as Muhammad's religion, since the verse would imply that God only approved of it at a particular moment in time.Footnote 46 I would argue that the verse becomes more legible if we gloss it this way: “Today I have perfected your religion for you, and I have completed my blessing on you, inasmuch as I have approved the monotheistic tradition as your religion”. The verse contrasts dedicated and self-sacrificing monotheists with feckless pagans. Only if, the Quran says, someone has been forced into paganism by the need to seek the patronage of the Meccan elite so as to avoid starvation, can the failure to adhere to that monotheistic tradition be in any way excused.
In Repentance 9: 74, the Quran reprimands former believers who had lapsed into the Meccan rites and who appear to have aligned politically with Abū Sufyān and other Quraysh who actively fought Muhammad's believers: “They swear by God that they said nothing, but in fact they affirmed paganism and disbelieved after having accepted islām. They thought up a plot that they were unable to put into effect, and they took revenge merely because God and his messenger enriched them out of graciousness. So, it is better for them if they repent; if they instead turn away, God will chastise them with a painful torment in this world and the next; on earth they have no protector or helper.” Islām is not the opposite of Jewish or Christian religion, but it is the opposite of pagan religion.
In The Chambers 49: 14 in the Medina period, the Quran makes a clear distinction between the religion of Muhammad in particular and the monotheistic tradition in general. Just as in the Christianity of that day there were two grades of Christians – catechumens or Christians-in-training, and “the faithful” who had fully committed and been baptized – so the Quran delineates two classes of believers in Muhammad's religion. In preparation for the baptism of catechumens, ecclesiastical authorities would transmit to them the apostolic tradition (paradosis). Likewise, the Quran reports, “The Bedouin say, ‘We have believed.’ Say: “You do not believe; rather say, ‘We have aslamnā’; for faith has not yet entered your hearts. If you obey God and his Messenger, he will not take anything at all away from you with regard to your works. In truth, God is Compassionate and All-Merciful.” It seems to me that if aslamnā here meant “acquiesced in the tradition”, it would make more sense than “submitted”. Surely submission and the act of faith are close to synonymous, whereas accepting a tradition could be a sign of mere conformism. Shortly after this passage, The Chambers 49: 17 appears to castigate those persons who joined Muhammad's movement in part to curry political favour. “They consider that they have done you a favour by accepting islām. Say: ‘Do not consider that your islām (islāmukum) does me any favours. Rather, it is God who conferred on you a favour, inasmuch as he has guided you to faith, should you be able to recognize the truth’.” Again, the text attributes agency to God and not the believer, which tells against reading islāmukum as “your submission”.
Muslims as monotheists
I am focusing here on the abstract noun islām and making an argument for its polysemy. Something may be gained, however, from looking as well at the related verb aslama and its active participle muslim. As with the Greek paradidomi, it also has a wide range of meanings beyond “to submit”. It is often asserted that there was no word in late antiquity for “monotheist” and that various phrases and circumlocutions had to be used to achieve this sense. Cambridge Platonist Henry More (1614–87) only coined “monotheist” in 1660. When, however, the active participle muslim derives from the simple verb and is intransitive, the best translation for it might be “monotheist”, that is, one who has accepted the perennial tradition of the one God.
In The Jinn (72), among the first chapters of the Quran to use the term muslim, the Quran describes a vision of the prophet Muhammad in which he is shown some of the lesser supernatural beings known in the Near East as jinn discussing their reaction to overhearing the prophet reciting his new scripture.Footnote 47 Those jinn who adopt Muhammad's path say (72: 3) that they have accepted that God is neither a husband nor a father, having neither wife nor child. They also say that neither they nor human beings had expected God to send a messenger. They then observe (72: 7–9) that they had been used to ascending to touch paradise, but now found it guarded by stern sentinels and by tongues of flame. A group of them concludes (72: 14), “And some of us have become monotheists (minnā al-muslimūn), and some of us have swerved from justice. Those who have become monotheists (aslama) have sought out the right path.” A slightly later passage, 72: 18, demonstrates that these jinn accepted the one God, inasmuch as therein they insist that altars (masājid) are solely for the worship of the one God and that no other deity should be invoked there. The Arabic word “masjid” also exists in cognate form (msgd) in ancient Nabataean inscriptions, where it can refer to a place of worship but can also bear the more specific meaning of “a tall votive altar”.Footnote 48
These sprites, virtually a Greek chorus, tell the story of their acceptance of the universal monotheistic tradition against an unmistakably pagan backdrop. Whereas they used to invoke multiple gods at the altar, now they pray only to God at the Kaaba. It might be said that they have accepted a new “tradition of the sacred objects” very different from that of Demeter at Eleusis. Whereas they used to seek to ascend unaided to paradise, now they find it guarded and inaccessible unless they approach it through faith in God's new envoy. They once believed that God had a wife and children (as with Zeus and his local equivalents in the Near East).Footnote 49 They now, however, deny the fatherhood of God and see him as exalted above these anthropomorphic relationships. These beliefs and practices, of monotheism, of abandonment of familial myths about the supreme deity, and of the institution of monolatry at his temple or shrine, most likely constitute the tradition (islām, paradosis) to which they have surrendered (aslama), becoming upholders of that tradition (muslimūn). That the jinn are among the first in the Quran to be inducted into these practices underlines their universality. Islām is not associated with any previous religion here. It is not even associated exclusively with a single species. The jinn acknowledge Muhammad's restatement of the tradition of the one God, which has made pagan practices ineffective and has dashed the hopes of any initiates who sought to become divine or ascend to paradise on their own.
Primal islām, the Quran says, existed even in antediluvian times. When Noah faced opposition from his people (Jonah 10: 71), he told them to do their worst. He added (10: 72), “Then if you turn away, I have not asked you for any recompense; my recompense comes only from God, and I have been commanded to be one of the monotheists (muslimīn)”.
The jinn appear elsewhere in connection with the monotheistic tradition. The Ants (Q. 27: 15–44) tells the story of Solomon and Sheba.Footnote 50 The passage begins by saying “We gave David and Solomon knowledge, and they said, ‘Praise be to God, who preferred us above many others of his believing servants’”. The “knowledge” given to these patriarchs is clearly the monotheistic tradition. The Quran tells of how Solomon invited the pagan queen Sheba, a worshipper of the sun god and other deities, to his court in Jerusalem. But before she could make the arduous journey up the Red Sea, the king decided to test her. He called the jinn and asked if any of them could magically transport her throne from her capital in Yemen to Solomon's court. One of the jinn who (Q. 27: 40) “had knowledge of scripture” said he could bring it in the twinkling of an eye. Then Solomon ordered the purloined seat of power redecorated, wanting to see if the queen had the discernment nevertheless to recognize it. When she arrived, he showed her the throne and asked if it was hers. The Quran (27: 42) has her reply, “It is as though it is the same. And we were given knowledge beforehand, and became monotheists (muslimīn)”. Thereafter, Solomon (Q. 27: 43) “Diverted her from her worship of beings other than God; she was, in truth, from a pagan people (qawmin kāfirīn)”. “Knowledge” (al-ʿilm) plays a role three times in this passage. The passage implies that by giving it to Solomon, God made him a superior monarch. Knowledge of the Torah of Moses allows the jinn to transport the Sheban throne. Finally, the queen passed Solomon's test, the Quran says, because she was given “knowledge” by God before the throne was shown to her. Her being or becoming one of the muslimīn and her ability to pass Solomon's test appears to be the result of her last-minute inspiration with gnosis by the one God. These verses associate “knowledge” with the worship of the one God in Jerusalem, with the Hebrew scriptures, and with a direct inspiration by God that reveals hidden secrets. The queen receives the latter sort of knowledge. Gnostics saw their secret teachings as a paradosis, and this story of the queen of Sheba has gnostic overtones, since here knowledge of the divine permits the performance of miracles. In this context, the phrase “wa kunnā muslimīn” can plausibly be read as “we followed the tradition”, having received gnosis.
The Quran also characterizes the patriarchs this way, saying that Abraham left a testament for his descendants, and God instructs them, “believe only after the manner of those who have submitted (muslimīn)”. Thereafter Jacob (2: 133) makes his children swear to him on his deathbed that they will worship his God, and they conclude “we will submit to him” (naḥnu lahu muslimīn). Even the passages deploying the phrasal verb aslama li maintain that serial prophecy continues to operate in the monotheistic nation to which Abraham's word gives birth. These passages depict being muslim and following islām as not only individual acts of recognizing the one God, but also a commitment to a tradition that is transmitted from generation to generation. Jacob has it from Abraham, and passes it to his here unnamed children – Joseph, Benjamin and the ten other brothers, who, according to the Bible, became the progenitors of the twelve tribes of Israel. In a different line, Abraham transmitted it to Ishmael and the latter's descendants, whom historians such as Josephus had identified as the Arabs, an identification the Quran accepts.Footnote 51 Moreover, the tradition is not only genealogical. A series of future prophets will intervene in it with a purified kerygma.
Quran 3: 84 underlines this connotation of the phrasal verb, of sacred history, instructing people to affirm that they believe in God and in what was revealed to Muhammad as well as to “Abraham, Ishmael, Isaac, Jacob and the tribes, and given to Moses, Jesus and the prophets by their lord”. It concludes, “We make no distinction among any of them, and we submit (lahu muslimīn) to him”. Submission to God here involves an acknowledgment that the prophets carrying the tradition are in some sense on the same spiritual plane.
The Table 5: 44 says, “We revealed the Torah, wherein is guidance and light. The prophets who aslamū judged in accordance with it for the Jews. So too did the sages and rabbis, by what they were entrusted with of the book of God, to which they bore witness”. Given that the verse treats the guidance that the scripture offers and the judgments that the prophets rendered in the light of it, it would make sense to render the first verse of the passage this way: “We revealed the Torah, wherein is guidance and light. The prophets, who followed the tradition, judged in accordance with it for the Jews”. Far from being an attribute only of Muhammad's believers, islām characterizes all monotheists throughout history.
One of the major meanings of paradosis in late antiquity was the apostolic tradition in Christianity. Irenaeus (d. 189), for instance, often spoke of the public paradosis of the apostles, which he probably configured as a foil to the Gnostics.Footnote 52 The Quran may refer to this principle in The Table 5: 111, which says in the voice of God of the disciples of Jesus, “When I inspired the apostles, ‘Believe in me and in my envoy’, they replied, ‘We have believed; so bear witness that we are monotheists (muslimīn)’.”
The late Meccan passage Stories 28: 52–3 refers to the adherents of the previous scriptures and praises them for their attitude to the Quran: “Those on whom we bestowed the Book aforetime believe in it. When it is recited to them they say, ‘We have believed in it. It is the truth from our lord. Even before it, we were monotheists (muslimīn)’”. This verse unquestionably makes it clear that being muslim does not mean following Muhammad's religion, and also makes it clear that not only the ancient children of Israel and the disciples in the time of Christ but also the Jews and Christians contemporaneous with Muhammad are muslims.
The term also pertains to Muhammad himself. The Crowds 39: 11–12 shows God instructing Muhammad, “Say: ‘Verily I am commanded to worship God, keeping his religion sincerely. And I have been commanded to be the foremost monotheist (awwal al-muslimīn).’” The word awwal here does not mean “first” in a serial sense. Inasmuch as he is renewing and purifying the monotheistic tradition, Muhammad has become its primary exemplar. In The Ant (27: 91), the Quran has Muhammad say, “As for me, I have been commanded to worship the lord of this city, who made it a sanctuary. All things belong to him. I was commanded to be among the monotheists (min al-muslimīn)”. In The Prophets 21: 105–8, the Quran quotes Psalms 37: 29, “The righteous shall inherit the land”. It next affirms to Muhammad, “We only sent you as a mercy to the worlds”. Then it instructs him (21: 108), “Say: ‘What was revealed to me is that your God is one God. Are you, then, monotheists?’” This verse seems a reference to Deuteronomy 6:4, “Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God is one Lord”. If so, the Quran here appears to quote the Hebrew Bible twice in the space of four verses, with the crescendo being the shema of Deuteronomy, so that the plural noun muslimīn seems to epitomize the monotheistic tradition of the Hebrew Bible.
Quranic paradosis in comparative context
Christian theologian Rudolf Bultmann argued that there is a key difference between the Jewish paradosis, which was the long tradition of the people, and the Christian paradosis, which was a tradition about a specific salvational event:
The problem of the relationship between history of salvation and world history, or between revelation and history, is posed by the paradosis in which both are united – posed anew as compared with the Old Testament and Judaism. For historical tradition could no longer have the meaning which it had in the Old Testament and Judaism. The revelation of God in Jesus was not an event in the history of the People, to which one could look back as to Moses’ history, the exodus from Egypt, the seizure of Canaan, or the history of the judges and the kings. The “new covenant”, … unlike the old, is not the founding event of a people's history, but, however much it arises from a historical event, the death of Jesus, it is nonetheless an eschatological event, and the “People of God” with which this covenant is made is an entity not of world history but of eschatology.Footnote 53
The islām/paradosis of the Quran differs from both the Jewish and Christian concepts as Bultmann described them. It is not the tradition of a single people but rather is universal and available to the gentiles, as Paul argued Christianity was. As Bultmann argues for Paul, it could at times be spoken of without reference to history at all; and as he argues with regard to Luke, it can also be framed in history. The paradosis of Muhammad is, however, not a tradition about a single, unique salvific event but rather a message about the unchanging unific nature of divine, as transmitted through serial prophetic interventions across human history. These prophets of the one God (The Bee 16: 36) come to “every people” (umma, likely in the New Testament sense of ethnos or ethnikos, e.g. Romans 3: 29).Footnote 54 The content of the tradition, unlike in Christianity, is not the acts or sacrifice of a single envoy of God but rather the severe unity of the divine that all the prophets taught, and which, it maintains, the adherents of every genuine historical religion accept.
Conclusion
Both the Muslim exegetical tradition and most Western scholarship has posited that the term islām in the Quran means “submission”, i.e. to God, and that it refers to the religion brought by the prophet Muhammad. Here I have attempted to show that neither of these assertions is correct. In Bar Penkaye's reference to a mashlmānutā of Muhammad we likely have an early non-Muslim witness to an Umayyad Muslim usage, islāmu Muḥammadin, which would have denoted not “submission” to Muhammad (blasphemous in a Muslim context) but the “tradition of Muhammad”. In turn, that tradition forms part of a broad, over-arching prophetic tradition of monotheism shared by Jews, Christians and pagan monotheists. The Aramaic mashlmānutā translated the Greek paradosis, and therefore likely so did the Arabic cognate islām. The range of significations of islām and the verb from which it is derived, aslama, demonstrate an eerie similarity to the Greek paradidomi.
The few instances of the Quran's use of the abstract noun islām do not generally support a reading of simple “submission”. Rather, islām involves recognizing the whole series of prophets rather than stopping with the one that founded a particular religious community (The Ranks 61: 7). It is something to which God opens the breasts of human beings (The Groups 39: 22) rather than being an act of surrender by a human agent. It is synonymous with the religion of God (Family of Amram 3: 85, The Table 5: 3). It is also synonymous with the Word or Logos of Abraham (The Pilgrimage 22: 78). Being muslim entails believing in God and in what was revealed to Muhammad as well as “to Abraham, Ishmael, Isaac, Jacob and the tribes, and given to Moses, Jesus and the prophets by their lord” (The Family of Amram 3: 84). Those characterized as upholding islām include, in addition, Joseph, the Queen of Sheba, and Jesus and his apostles, as well as seventh-century Christians even before they encountered the Quran. In short, the term refers to “the prophetic tradition of monotheism”, which predates and yet encompasses Muhammad's preaching. All monotheistic religions participate in the Platonic form of Islām. That is, the Quran speaks only of the, universal paradosis, not of a particular tradition. “Those who have believed” (alladhīna āmanū) accepted the specific kerygma of the Prophet Muhammad, yet are at the same time muslims, a status they share with members of the other monotheistic religions, such that Christians are also muslims. Indeed, The Chambers 49: 14 depicts the Bedouin equivalent of catechumens or “believers-in-waiting” as having reached only the general level of islām, not the specific status of full believer in the Quranic revelation.
I posit that loanshifts in Levantine Arabic vocabulary, adopted into the Quran, created a difficulty for later generations of Muslim Arabic-speakers. Some concepts proved unstable in an environment where people did not know the other languages. After Muhammad's death islām often came to mean just submission or acceptance (only one of the meanings of paradidomi in Greek), and it shifted from being the Quran's word for general monotheism to referring to the religion of Muhammad specifically. The Quran says that islām is the only acceptable religion, by which it means that only the paradosis of Abrahamic monotheism will do (3: 19, 3: 85). Muslim exegetes of the succeeding generations such as Ibn Kathīr, however, read it to say that that those who do not accept the religion and laws brought by Muhammad are damned to hell, turning the Quran's pluralist vision into a triumphalist exclusivism. The Quran's notion of a “covenant of the prophets” does configure the full tradition of islām as crucially including the chapter of Muhammad's dispensation, but it affirms that salvation is still possible for Jews and Christians who uphold only part of the historical concatenation that is the tradition, inasmuch as they still adhere to the basics, of faith in one God, righteous deeds, and belief in the Judgment Day (The Cow 2: 62).
