What Is the

Qur’an?

What the Qur’an to this day, medieval Muslim scholars profoundly

Meant: And Why shape our understanding of the Qur’an. When the
It Matters English lawyer George Sale first translated the Qur’an
By Garry Wills into English from the original Arabic in 1734, he relied
viking, 240 pp., $25 heavily on centuries-old Islamic language. Jallalo’ddin,
Beidawi, and Zamakhshari, the names of some of Islam’s
greatest exegetes, fill his footnotes. When Keith Ellison
placed his hand on Thomas Jefferson’s copy of Sale after
becoming the first Muslim member of Congress, it rested
on a hundred-page summary of Muslim history and
commentary preceding the scripture.
Not much has changed since Sale’s time. The latest
academic English translation, The Study Quran, pub-
lished in 2015, cites the opinions of over forty medieval
commentators. Their views are valuable at times: they
were skilled philologists who unraveled some of the
scripture’s knottiest textual problems. But more often
than not they read their own values into the Qur’an.

2 IDEA
 Qu’ran Folio, probably Iran or present-day Afghanistan, Ghaznavid period, c. 1050
CREDIT TK

JAN/FEB 2018 ISSUE 2 3

Since their commentaries are baked into the
translations, the way they read the text is the
way English speakers read the text today, for
better and worse. This is helpful in under-
standing how Muslims have understood
their own scripture, of course; the history of
scriptural interpretation is an integral part
of a scriptural faith, at least as it is under-
stood and practiced by its adherents. But
sometimes it obscures what the scripture’s
author intended.
Islamic tradition and the latest forensic
evidence agree that the Qur’an appeared
in the first half of the seventh century. Its
contents initially circulated as separate
scriptures, which were combined in a single
volume soon after Muhammad’s death in
632 CE. The text is written in the voice of
God, so Muslims believe it is a record of His
speech and not the words of a man. Whereas
Jesus is the Word for Christians, the word is
the Word for Muslims.
But the meaning of the Word is not
always obvious. Unlike much of the Hebrew
Bible and the New Testament, the Qur’an
lacks context clues to help decipher the
text’s intent. We usually don’t know who
God is addressing or why. It’s the Ten Com-
mandments without the burning bush, the
Sermon on the Mount without the mount.
It was left to later Muslim scholars to fill in
the gaps based on stories passed down by
early believers.
We do not have to read the book this
way. Modern scholars of other scriptures have
translated or explained them by referring to
contemporaneous texts, rather than the later
interpretive tradition. They treat the tradition
as a product of its time and place, as is the
scripture it purports to interpret. One of
the most skilled practitioners of this kind of
scholarship is Garry Wills, who has made a
career of explaining the original meaning of
scriptures, sacred and secular. The Gospels,
Paul’s epistles, the Federalist Papers, and the
4 IDEA
Gettysburg Address have all received the
same treatment: Wills reads the texts in their
original language, explains the historical
context, and defers to later interpretations
only as a last resort. The title of Wills’s new
book, What the Qur’an Meant: And Why It
Matters, suggests he will give Islam’s holiest
scripture the same treatment.
So does his vow to rely on the latest
Qur’anic scholarship: “I am not a Qur’an
scholar, obviously. I cannot be one, since I do
not know Arabic.” To make up for this rather
significant deficiency, he argues, he must
turn to scholars of the book. This is sensible
enough. But the scholarship on which Wills
relies is almost exclusively The Study Quran.
Wills cites the book at least forty times in
the 145 pages he devotes to discussing the
Qur’an. His understanding of the scripture is
correspondingly and sorely limited, confined
as it is to the traditional commentaries
collected by The Study Quran’s authors.
Had Wills surveyed the welter of opin-
ions found in commentaries on the Qur’an,
both ancient and modern, his readers would
see that Muslims have disagreed profoundly
about the book’s meaning. Like all interpret-
ers of scripture, Muslim commentators start
with different assumptions about how to read
their holy texts. They argue over what other
books they have to take into account, which
lead them to very different understandings. A
progressive Muslim reads the Qur’an differ-
ently than an ultraconservative Salafi.
Here is a small example. Verses 7-9 of the
sixtieth sura, or chapter, of the Qur’an de-
clare that God will “create affection” between
believers and “those whom they hate.” The
verses also encourage believers to be “kind
and just” to those who do not fight them or
drive them from their homes. Some medieval
commentators believed these benevolent
verses were abrogated by other, more militant
verses, whereas other interpreters, such as the
polymath al-Tabari in the ninth century CE,

said they were never abrogated. Today, in the
same way, ultraconservative Muslims argue
that these verses are subordinate to others,
which say that believers should never love
infidels. Meanwhile, progressives insist that
the verses should soften others that sound
intolerant. Each reading is consistent with its
own rules of interpretation, and irreconcil-
able with the reading of the opposing camp.
Wills, however, is not interested in
making a broader—and immensely import-
ant—point about the diversity of Islamic
thought. Instead, he is on the hunt for com-
mentaries that will help him prove that both
jihadists and infidel critics of the Qur’an
have misunderstood the book. “To help the
majority of believers in Islam, and to be
JAN/FEB 2018 ISSUE 2
helped by them,” he writes, “we must see how
far terrorists have departed from the book
they say they believe in.” The jihadists and
critics have erred, Wills confidently contends,
because they are either ignorant of the book’s
true meaning or they have not read it. This
is a strange charge to level at someone like
ISIS’s leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, who has
a doctorate in Qur’anic studies.
Wills aspires to remedy the ignorance
of jihadists and Qur’an critics by reading
the scripture with fresh eyes. Alas, he
knows so little about classical Islam, and he
relies so much on the opinions of certain
learned Muslims, that he is vulnerable
to their anachronisms and their agendas.
The problem is apparent early on, when he
endorses a letter written by Muslim scholars
who criticize ISIS for misunderstanding the
Qur’an. Wills does not realize that these
scholars have themselves departed from the
Qur’an in novel ways to make their case. As
Ella Landau-Tasseron, a scholar of classical
Islam, has demonstrated, both ISIS and the
letter’s authors strain the Qur’an’s meaning
to justify their positions on issues such as
jihad and slavery. This is only the first of
many instances in which Wills is misled by
his right-thinking (that is, left-thinking)
exegetes, undermining his aim to expose
the ignorance of the jihadists and the
Qur’an’s critics.
Of course, Wills is right to counsel
readers throughout his book not to judge
Islam—or any religion—according to the
most extreme interpretations of its scriptures.
Jihadists represent a minority view among
Muslims when it comes to violence; ISIS’s
poll numbers rarely reach double digits in
Muslim countries. And critics of the Qur’an
unfairly blame the majority of Muslims for
the sins of the few. Still, by the end of Wills’s
book, the casual reader cannot be sure if the
jihadists and the critics have truly misread
the Qur’an; she only knows that they read it
5
differently than the interpreters whom Wills
prefers. The more informed reader, on the
other hand, knows that the jihadists and the
critics can produce just as many canonical
medieval commentaries to support their
views. And the jihadists are often better at
this game than their detractors. Evil people
are not always ignorant people.

fter three throat-clearing chap-

ters on Iraq and September 11
that have little to do with the
Qur’an—including a bewildering
fusillade against Francis Fukuyama—Wills
begins to make his case against the jihadists
and the critics. He focuses on four contro-
versial topics addressed in the scripture:
interfaith relations, war, law, and women.
According to Wills, the Qur’an envisions
three separate monotheistic communities—
Jews, Christians, and Muslims—living in
harmony. Each has its own covenant with
God and should not try to convert the oth-
ers; rather, the three faiths should be “allies”
in trying to convert the pagans. The Qur’an,
Wills asserts, never condones violence against
Jews and Christians. Indeed, it encourages
Muslims to marry them.
Wills ignores or downplays passages and
commentaries that do not fit his program.
The Qur’an praises Jews and Christians Qu’ran Folio, Shiraz mid-16th century
who follow Muhammad’s new book, under- CREDIT TK

cutting Wills’s contention that the Qur’an

doesn’t want Muhammad’s followers to win
these “people of scripture” to his nascent
Islamic community. The Qur’an instructs
Muslims not to ally with Jews and Chris-
tians, which Wills acknowledges, but he does
not reconcile this with his contrary view
that the Qur’an wants the three faiths to be
“allies” against the pagans. Wills’s statement
that the Qur’an wants the three faiths to
intermarry is not qualified by the Qur’anic
verse that stipulates that only Muslim men
can marry infidel women. His bold assertion
that the Qur’an never condones violence
against Jews and Christians is contradicted
by the verse that states: “Fight those who do
not believe in God, nor the Last Day, nor
forbid what God and His Messenger forbade,
nor observe the true religion among those
who possess the Book unless they pay the
tribute out of hand, degraded.” Most of the
medieval Muslim commentators Wills relies
on contend that this verse requires fighting

6 IDEA
Jews and Christians until they pay tribute, a
reading he willfully chooses to ignore.
Had Wills consulted recent academic
work on conversion in early Islam, he would
have learned that there is a lively debate
about whether or not Muhammad believed
he was founding a separate religious commu-
nity, or merely initiating a monotheistic re-
form movement that would include Jews and
Christians. If Muhammad was not creating
a separate community, then the whole notion
of “conversion” is an anachronism, reflecting
later Muslim views and not the views of the
Prophet. All this is missing from the pages of
What the Qur’an Meant.
When Wills discusses war in the Qur’an,
some of the same problems arise. He repeats
the standard red herrings that appear in
Muslim apologetics: the phrase “holy war”
does not occur in the Qur’an; the book
does not mention virgins as a reward for
martyrdom in battle; the so-called “sword
verse” that commands Muslims to kill
polytheists doesn’t use the word “sword.”
These platitudes are either misleading (the
absence of a phrase is not the absence of a
concept) or inaccurate (there are virgins that
reward noble deeds, and those deeds include
martyrdom on the battlefield).
In his discussion of war, Wills proclaims
that “the Qur’an never advocates war as a
means of religious conversion,” and that
it only permits fighting in self-defense.
These statements contradict verse 9:5, which
requires Muslims to battle polytheists until
they repent and adopt Islam’s religious
rituals, and verse 9:29, which commands
the believers to fight “people of scripture” of
some sort. Wills’s position also goes against
the reading of most later Muslim commen-
tators, whom he is eager to quote elsewhere
when they align with his views. I happen to
agree with Wills’s positions on this subject,
but his skimpy argument and his failure to
air other interpretations will lead informed
JAN/FEB 2018 ISSUE 2
readers to suspect that he is engaging in
apologetics, rather than representing the text
fairly. Their suspicion will be correct.
Wills also ignores an entire body of
Islamic scripture, the hadith, that sometimes
advocates offensive warfare to spread the
domain of Islam. The hadith are statements
attributed to Muhammad that were collected
decades or even centuries after his passing.
Muslim scholars debate the authenticity of
individual hadith the way Christian scholars
debate the authenticity of verses in the
Gospels. Still, these sayings are an important
source of religious guidance for most Mus-
lims, including on the topic of warfare—a fact
that flatly contradicts Wills’s statement that
“Muslim orthodoxy lies in the Qur’an.” Wills
can be forgiven for ignoring these scriptures,
since his book is about the Qur’an; but he
should acknowledge the Muslims (jihadists
included) who take them seriously and use
them to interpret the Qur’an. Their “igno-
rant” readings of the Qur’an make a lot more
sense when one takes the hadith into account.
There is a certain Protestantism to
Wills’s approach: the Qur’an is sola scriptura
for Muslims as the Bible is for Protestants,
a single shining sun that illuminates the
religious terrain. But most Muslims treat the
Qur’an as a lodestar, found and followed by
the aid of a constellation of scriptures.
Wills’s discussion of Islamic law suffers
from the same problems. “The word shari’ah
is used only once in the Qur’an, and there
it does not mean ‘law,’” he instructs. But
then he quotes a passage where a variant
of the word is used in the sense of law. The
Qur’an is not a penal code, Wills remarks,
which is true; but he does not help the reader
appreciate the bluntly stated punishments for
crimes such as theft or illicit sex. Wills also
fails to mention that the Qur’an’s rules were
vastly elaborated in the hadith, which most
Muslims consider probative in matters of
religious law.
7
 If readers do not know all this ahead
of time, they would think devout Muslims
needlessly obsess about the law when it is not
a big deal in the Qur’an. According to Wills,
only a “minority” of Muslims want to impose
a “medieval” understanding of the shari’ah.
Really? According to public opinion polling,
that “minority” is a healthy majority in coun-
tries such as Egypt, Morocco, and Pakistan.
And it is not just their understanding of
Islamic law that is medieval—the scriptures
that contain it are medieval, too.
n his final chapters, on women,
Wills dwells on the problems
posed by passages in the Qur’an
that are out of step with the
modern liberal world. The Qur’an, he states,
“is definitely patriarchal—as is any seventh-
century document.” Moreover, the Torah,
the Gospels, and the Qur’an “are all patriar-
chal, and therefore misogynist—as were the
societies in which they took shape.” This is
incontrovertible by today’s liberal standards.
The Qur’an’s liberal readers can appreciate
some of its progressive views on women—
which Wills does—while admitting that they
are regressive now.
Yet Wills’s desire to smooth the Qur’an’s
rough edges sometimes leads him to need-
lessly obfuscate its plain meaning, even when
it is not terribly offensive. Take verse 24:30-31,
which instructs male and female believers to
lower their gaze and guard their private parts.
Women are further instructed to “draw their
scarves over their bosoms” and “not display
their charms” to strange men. The second
instruction is vague—what is a “charm”? But
the first is straightforward, which is why it’s
odd that Wills maintains that the verse “has
nothing to do with women’s clothing.” It
may not be a full-throated call for the hijab,
but it is certainly a demand for women to
cover their chests.
Wills’s desire to save the Qur’an from
8 IDEA
its modern misinterpreters also leads him
to downplay other issues that would offend
many readers today. He briefly mentions that
the Qur’an permits a Muslim man to “have
sexual intercourse with pagan slaves he had
won, bought, or captured.” That’s largely
true, and it certainly merits more discussion
than the single sentence he devotes to it, es-
pecially since ISIS claims to have revived the
institution of slavery as the Prophet intended
it to be practiced.
The most rewarding parts of What the
Qur’an Meant are where Wills strays from the
apologetics and the polemics to write about
the subjects he knows best, such as Christian
scripture and history. The misunderstandings
surrounding the Qur’anic “sword verse,” he
tells us, have a parallel in medieval mis-
understandings of a statement in Luke, in
which Jesus tells his disciples to buy swords
in fulfillment of prophecy and then becomes
annoyed when they take him literally. Wills
observes that during the Middle Ages, some
Church leaders cited the verses to justify
papal armies.
Ignoring the commentaries sometimes
enables Wills to arrive at surprising inter-
pretations that make better sense of the
Qu’ran. When Wills reads a verse that says
“your wives are your fields, so go into your
fields whichever way you like,” he breaks
with the conventional reading of the text as
requiring women to perform sex on demand.
Instead, he explains the verse in the context
of polygyny and says that it has to do with
the rotation of wives—an original reading (at
least to me) that meshes with other Qur’anic
verses about household politics. Wills’s treat-
ment of the Qur’an’s geographical context
similarly offers fresh insight, especially where
it relies on the author’s own analysis.
Wills would have found much to help
him slip the bonds of tradition had he
consulted recent academic studies of the
Qur’an’s original meaning. In the last decade,

a handful of Muslim and non-Muslim
scholars, many affiliated with the Interna-
tional Qur’anic Studies Association, have
vastly expanded our understanding of the
book by reading the Qur’an without the help
of the later commentaries, and by comparing
it with earlier and contemporaneous texts
and artifacts. They have made some startling
discoveries: that the Jews and Christians of
Muhammad’s day knew of alternative bibles,
that Muhammad was an ardent apocalypti-
cist, and that the pagans of Mecca may not
have been pagan after all.
The reason these findings are so at odds
with the traditional Muslim understanding
of the Qur’an is that the first Muslims
who recorded their interpretations of the
JAN/FEB 2018 ISSUE 2
Qur’an lived a century after the book was
written. These interpreters did not know
Muhammad’s world, which had been swept
away after the Arab conquest that carried
the culture of Islam from the desert interior
of the Hijaz to cosmopolitan Damascus and
Baghdad.
onsider the following example.
Verse 9:30 of the Qur’an criti-
cizes the Jews for saying “Uzayr
is a son of God.” The name
was unfamiliar to later Muslims, so they
conjectured that Uzayr must be the biblical
priest Ezra, who restored the Torah after
the Babylonian exile, according to Jewish
tradition. The Qur’an, the Muslims asserted,
was criticizing the Jews for worshipping Ezra
as the son of God, just as the Christians
worshipped Jesus as God’s offspring.
The problem with such a reading is that
Jews had never called Ezra a son of God.
“They lie about us, and falsely attribute to us
the statement that God has a son,” grumbled
the great Maimonides. He and other Jews
accused Muhammad of charlatanism for
advancing such a patently false doctrine.
Islam’s Christian detractors also seized on
the error to score polemical points, leading
the Muslim satirist Jahiz to complain that
“they say the proof of our book is false and
our cause corrupt because we attribute to
them what neither they nor their forefathers
know… .They claim that we attribute to them
what they do not know just as we attribute
to the Jews what they do not know when our
book says and our prophet testifies that the
Jews said Ezra is the son of God.”
It was not until the early twentieth
century that a German-Jewish Semiticist
named Rudolf Leszynsky realized that the
controversy was much ado about nothing:
Muslims had simply misunderstood Muham-
mad’s allusion. Leszynsky, who had trained
as a rabbi, assumed that Muhammad would
9
not have, in his words, “drawn it from thin
air to denigrate the Jews.” So he hunted for
“the only place (in the Hebrew Bible) where
someone who is searching for polytheism
among the Jews could discover something
like it.” That place, Leszynsky argued,
was Leviticus 16:8-10, where God instructs
Moses to have his brother Aaron bring two
goats before God on the Day of Atonement.
Aaron is to sacrifice one goat to God at
the Tabernacle for the sins of the Israelites,
and allow the other goat to escape into the
wilderness “for Azazel” as a further sacrifice.
(The people who translated the King James
Bible borrowed William Tyndale’s neologism
“scapegoat” for the escaped goat, which is
where we get the term.)
Modern Jews do not believe that “Aza-
zel” is a reference to a separate being, but
many ancient Jews did. For them, he was
one of the angelic “sons of God” mentioned
in Genesis, whom God exiled after they
had sex with women. Despite Azazel’s fall
from divine grace, he continued to have a
following among the Jewish magicians of
Muhammad’s day, who invoked his name in
their thaumaturgical incantations. According
to Leszynsky, it was this figure, also known
as Azael, to whom Muhammad was refer-
ring, and not Ezra—an argument borne out
by studies of early Qur’anic orthography.
By criticizing Jews for saying “Azael is
the son of God,” Muhammad was cleverly
exploiting the angel’s ambiguous status in
Judaism to accuse the Jews of polytheism.
The Prophet was not fairly describing the
nuances of Jewish practice and belief, but
that was not his intent; he meant to make
a polemical point about the deficiencies of
Jewish monotheism, and his Azael reference
would have hit his Jewish audience where it
hurt. Later Muslims missed Muhammad’s
allusion, because the religious world the
Prophet knew had vanished by the time they
came along.
10 IDEA
Leszynsky’s method of reading the
Qur’an was not novel. Classically trained
philologists commonly approached the text
this way in the early twentieth century. But
the method fell out of favor, until recently.
Academics sniffed at the endeavor as an
Orientalist enterprise to deprive Muslims of
their religious heritage, or as an exercise in
simple-minded hermeneutics divorced from
the latest advances in literary theory. Better
to privilege the way Muslims themselves
had understood the text, it was said, or to
abandon all hope of recovering any meaning
divorced from its later readers.
It is certainly worthwhile to study how
Muslims have understood the Qur’an, and
we should always be mindful of the hostility
that sometimes motivates attempts to recover
an original meaning for the Qur’an. When
Islamophobes celebrate scholarly articles on
the Qur’an that go against traditional Mus-
lim understanding of the text, they are not
reveling in scholarly achievement so much
as they are celebrating Muslims’ supposed
ignorance of their own faith. But politics
and piety should not stop scholars from
trying to unravel any scripture’s mysteries
without reference to the later tradition. We
do not expect this from biblical scholars and
we should not demand it from scholars of
the Qur’an.
Without a baseline translation of the
Qur’an independent from its later Muslim
interpretation, non-Muslims have no
touchstone for judging the credibility of
jihadist claims that the Qur’an validates
their behavior. They also have no basis for
dismissing unedifying readings of the Qu’ran
that do not comport with their own political
or philosophical preferences. They are left,
like George Sale nearly three centuries ago,
and Garry Wills today, to read the book as
its interpreters read it. For such readers, the
Qur’an has no independent meaning; it is
commentaries all the way down.