Tharif in Islam
May 27, 2021 3:26 PM Subscribe
According to Wikipedia, some Muslims believe that some of the texts held sacred by Jews were modified, and thus convey divine revelation imperfectly. How widespread is this belief among religious leaders and laypeople? Is it enunciated in any exegetical works popular today? Are there any organized tendencies within Islam that do not take this position and/or do not hold to a supersessionist view of Judaism? As a bonus question: are there any organized tendencies that do not take a supersessionist view of Christianity?
I don't have any deep knowledge of this doctrine, but I have been reading a book -- The Law of God by French philosopher Rémi Brague -- that touches on the issue in passing. He writes that it is a doctrine both rooted in the Quran and inconsistently interpreted by the tradition.
Not having an English copy here is, for what it's worth, my try at translating some relevant text:
As regards Islam, the doctrine of falsification is based on passages in the Quran that accuse certain groups, in particular amongst the Jews, of having changed the received text, of having replaced it with another, of having hidden part of it, or, simply of having forgotten it. We don't much know exactly which Jews are accused, whether it's a matter of contemporaries of Muhammed or of those from an epoch between Moses and Muhammed. [...] Some verses from Mecca presuppose the legitimacy of the Torah. The same holds for some verses from Medina, despite their context of polemic against Jews and Christians. It's the logic of the argumentation which demands this recognition of authenticity, since here the Jews are reproached with not conforming themselves to the prescriptions of their own holy scriptures.
The hadith is not unanimous, even within a single chain of transmitters. Thus, of two stories passed down under the name of Ibn Abbas -- assuming that is a reliable attribution -- one suggests it's a matter of alteration of the words, and the other, of bad interpretation. (Brague, La loi de dieu, pg. 118)
Brague goes on to describe Islamic attempts to interpret the Hebrew Scriptures allegorically, to bring its sense closer to Islamic theology. From which I infer that some Islamic scholars at least are looking pretty closely at the Hebrew text, whether in translation or the original, which one wouldn't do if one simply believed the text to be falsified and unauthentic. Reading the Old Testament allegorically (in terms of a 'spiritual sense') is also, of course, a very widespread and ancient Christian strategy for dealing with its problematic parts, which, for a Christian, can be many. Check out Church Father Origen on this approach.
posted by bertran at 7:34 PM on May 28, 2021
Not having an English copy here is, for what it's worth, my try at translating some relevant text:
As regards Islam, the doctrine of falsification is based on passages in the Quran that accuse certain groups, in particular amongst the Jews, of having changed the received text, of having replaced it with another, of having hidden part of it, or, simply of having forgotten it. We don't much know exactly which Jews are accused, whether it's a matter of contemporaries of Muhammed or of those from an epoch between Moses and Muhammed. [...] Some verses from Mecca presuppose the legitimacy of the Torah. The same holds for some verses from Medina, despite their context of polemic against Jews and Christians. It's the logic of the argumentation which demands this recognition of authenticity, since here the Jews are reproached with not conforming themselves to the prescriptions of their own holy scriptures.
The hadith is not unanimous, even within a single chain of transmitters. Thus, of two stories passed down under the name of Ibn Abbas -- assuming that is a reliable attribution -- one suggests it's a matter of alteration of the words, and the other, of bad interpretation. (Brague, La loi de dieu, pg. 118)
Brague goes on to describe Islamic attempts to interpret the Hebrew Scriptures allegorically, to bring its sense closer to Islamic theology. From which I infer that some Islamic scholars at least are looking pretty closely at the Hebrew text, whether in translation or the original, which one wouldn't do if one simply believed the text to be falsified and unauthentic. Reading the Old Testament allegorically (in terms of a 'spiritual sense') is also, of course, a very widespread and ancient Christian strategy for dealing with its problematic parts, which, for a Christian, can be many. Check out Church Father Origen on this approach.
posted by bertran at 7:34 PM on May 28, 2021
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posted by shaademaan at 6:11 AM on May 28, 2021 [1 favorite]