>> From the Library of
Congress in Washington, DC.
>> Janice Hyde: Good afternoon.
My name is Janice Hyde.
And I'm the interim director of
the John W. Kluge Center here
at the Library of Congress.
The John W. Kluge Center is
delighted to host today's lecture.
The Kluge Center brings
together scholars and researchers
from around the world to exchange
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to distill wisdom from the library's
rich resources and to interact
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The center offers opportunities
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and post-doctoral fellows
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in the unparalleled collections
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It also offers free public
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and it periodically
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achievement
in the humanities and
social sciences.
For more information
about the Kluge Center,
please visit our website,
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Today's program is titled Peace
and Concord in the Qur'an.
It features Dr. Juan Cole, the
2016 Kluge chair in Countries
and Cultures of the South.
Dr. Cole's research at the Library
of Congress examines the concept
of peace in Muslim scripture.
He has traced the evolution of peace
and corollary ideas chronologically
and contextually through the text
with special attention to sets
of words grouped together
that reference the topic.
In today's lecture he will provide
a tour of the irenic messages,
those related to peace and
concord embedded in the Qur'an.
Juan Cole is the Richard P. Mitchell
collegiate professor of history
at the University of Michigan.
He has authored or edited more
than ten books on the Middle East,
including The New Arabs:
How the Millennial Generation
is changing the Middle East.
His informed comment blog
provides historical context
to modern day events
in the Muslim world.
Dr. Cole has appeared on ABC Nightly
News, Nightline, the Today Show,
Charlie Rose, Anderson Cooper 360,
Chris Hayes' All In, Rachel Meadow,
the Colbert Report,
and Democracy Now.
Dr. Cole has agreed to respond
to a few questions following
this presentation and I ask
that you wait please until you
receive a microphone before asking
your question so that we can record
both the question and the response.
It is now my pleasure to invite
to the podium, Dr. Juan Cole.
[ Applause ]
>> Juan Cole: Well thank
you very much, Janice,
for that warm introduction.
And my thanks to the Kluge Center
whose resources and the staff
of the center and the
Library of Congress have been
so incredibly helpful to me
in my research this summer.
And for the nice appointment
to the Kluge chair this summer.
My subject as you have all heard
is peace and harmony in the Qur'an.
And I'm aware that I'm swimming
against the tide a little bit here
with this subject, but let me
see if I can make my case to you.
I want to underline that the Qur'an,
like the Bible, has verses in it
about peace and it has
verses in it about war.
Somehow the latter
get more attention.
And when I first started
thinking about writing this book,
I became excited at the idea
and then I thought, "Well,
it must have been done to death."
And so I went to the bibliographic
literature and did a search
and I found that there are
some works on the subject,
but it's not a really
big literature.
And I was surprised actually
at how little the subject
has been addressed.
Whereas there are lots and lots
of books about war and Jihad
and so forth in the Qur'an.
I also want to underline
that when I say peace,
of course I'm using an English word.
And words have different
meanings in different languages.
I think of it as a
spectrum, you know.
Typically a word in one language
overlaps with part of the meaning
of a word in another language,
but then there are
parts that are left out.
So peace in Semitic
languages, in Hebrew and Arabic,
scholars have observed is
not just the absence of war.
It's not the absence of conflict.
That's implied.
But it has a positive
meaning of wellbeing.
And so it goes along with -- we
say often peace and prosperity.
We use two words to get at
probably what the Hebrew Bible
or the Qur'an means by one word.
And so then not only does
peace mean different things
in different languages, a range
of semantic signification,
but also there are different
kinds of peace even in English.
We say that someone has inner peace.
You could imagine saying
that a Marine at the height
of a battle was possessed
with a kind of inner peace.
So inner peace wouldn't necessarily
be contrary to being in war.
There's peace with God.
We say, we have the phrase,
making one's peace with God.
There's peace with
members of your ingroup.
This is a challenge to
achieve every Thanksgiving,
but we make the attempt.
There's peace with members of the
outgroup, which is also challenging.
And then there's geopolitical peace.
Peace has broken out, we say
in such and such a region.
So in all of these meanings of
peace and these various places
that it occurs, it's
not an absolute.
Unlike with pregnancy,
you can have a little bit
of peace and it's not a spectrum.
The perspective with which I
am going to approach the text
of the Muslim scripture, the Qur'an,
is that of apocalyptic literature.
And apocalyptic literature has a
special meaning in scholarship.
We now use the word apocalypse to
mean like the end of the world.
An event is apocalyptic.
But the Greek actually
just means revelation.
And so apocalyptic literature
is not primarily about the end
of the world, although it often
does advert to that subject.
But it's about a revelation.
It's about a special insight
being given to a seer.
Typically this kind of literature
depicts the seer as ascending
into heaven or going
on a spiritual journey.
And there's usually
an angel involved.
And angels, you know, develop
relatively late in the Bible.
But by the 600's, there everywhere.
And the angel will reveal
the secret to the seer
or will interpret the secret
that has been revealed.
Often but not always, apocalyptic
literature has a political dimension
as well as a spiritual one.
And so the prophet or the
seer will make a prophecy
which has a political implication.
And it may or may not involve
belief in an imminent judgement day.
As I said, that's one of the
frequent occurring themes,
but it's not always there.
And when we think about
apocalyptic literature in the west,
the two biblical books
that would immediately come
to mind are the book
of Daniel and the book
of Revelation in the New Testament.
It often involves the prediction
of a coming great peace.
Apocalyptic literature
often sees this world,
the time that we're living in, as
a maelstrom, but with a promise
of a very different kind
of world over the horizon.
And so I am going to argue
that the Qur'an shares in some
of the characteristics of
apocalyptic literature of this era.
The Qur'an began coming to
the prophet Muhammad in Arabia
in the midst of what I call
the 7th century world war.
There was an enormous conflict
that broke out roughly 603-604
of the Common Era between
the Persian or Iranian Empire
and the Byzantine Empire,
the late Roman Empire
which had taken Constantinople
as its capital.
And in the course of which
Iran took over Syria,
much to the dismay
of Constantinople.
For those of you who
follow today's politics,
there is nothing new under the sun.
Istanbul is now unhappy about
Iran's presence in Syria.
So Istanbul is what we
now call Constantinople.
But this was a very
dramatic set of events
because the Roman Empire had come
into the near east in
the age of Hadrian.
106, they took Syria and Jordan.
And had had this region
pretty steadily.
There were occasional invasions and
so forth, but it had this region
and administered pretty steadily
since then, from 106-614 or so.
And to have Iran come in and
just take over the whole thing --
and they took Egypt
as well, by the way.
I mean, this is unprecedented
since the time of the Achaemenids,
since the time of Cyrus the Great.
I mean, so it's a huge thing.
And that's the context for
the emergence of the Qur'an.
Historians have increasingly
in recent decades --
although this is an idea that goes
back to the late 19th century,
but in recent decades especially
in the American academy,
historians have become particularly
interested in this period
that they're calling late antiquity.
You know, in the early 20th century,
if you studied the classical world
you would study, the Republic,
the Roman Republic, and then
Julius Caesar and Augustus.
And then, you know, the conversion
of the empire to Christianity
under Constantine in the 300's.
And then you know, the barbarians
show up, the Huns and so forth,
and Rome falls in the
middle of the 400's.
And after that it's the Dark Ages.
And you know, the really bright,
aggressive graduate
students would want
to work on the glorious periods.
So who would want to
you know, specialize --
you have to explain to your parents,
you're in graduate
school for eight years.
"What are you doing?"
"Well, I'm studying the Dark Ages."
So nobody wanted to do that.
But in recent decades, Peter Brown
at Princeton and others have argued
that if you took kind of 300 or
400 to 800 or so and looked at is
as a period, that it has
certain virtues for historians
in understanding the
world as it was then.
But in order to make
it not the Dark Ages
and not unglorious,
you'd have to move east.
You know, admittedly,
Spain, Italy, France,
they were a mess you
know, after 450.
Britain too.
The economy went down the tubes
and people were much poorer.
They lost technological knowledge
that they used to have and so forth.
But in what is now Turkey, the
Balkans, Syria, Egypt and Tunisia,
those areas, as far
as the archaeologists can
discover, they were doing fine.
They were still prosperous.
They had a great economy.
They had a lot of technology.
Things were going great.
And they were being ruled
from Constantinople,
from what is now Istanbul.
And so if you shifted
your gaze east,
then there's a not
dark age to study here.
And admittedly, it's different
from the early classical period
in the sense that they are
Christians now, for the most part.
Although you know, remember that
Christianity, they only became kind
of the official religion
of the empire in the 300's.
So by the early 600's surely
there were still lots of pagans.
They had to kind of be quiet about
being pagans, but they were there
in very large numbers still.
They had their own conflicts.
The Christian authorities from the
late 300's started banning public
pagan rituals.
So one historian said
that, you know,
they were still there
but they were quiet.
And then you know, there's a
saying in the ancient world,
in the late antique world that
wherever you found 10 Christians,
there would be 11 theological
opinions amongst them.
And they seemed to
have really minded
if you had a different opinion.
Like to the point of bloodshed.
So there was a very severe
conflict and riots and persecutions
over Christology, over how you would
think about the figure of Christ
and his relationship to the Holy
Spirit and to God the Father
and whether he had one nature or
two natures and so on and so forth.
I won't go into the details.
It's very complicated, but
apparently it could get you killed.
And then as I mentioned,
the Emperor Khosrau II
of Iran was expanding his empire
quite dramatically at the expense
of the Byzantine or
eastern Roman Empire.
There were serious
conflicts with Jews.
Jews of course by that time
demographically, they had lost out.
The Christians had
become much more numerous.
There had been a period
earlier on in the Near East
where maybe the Jews and the
Christians were both you know,
kind of persecuted minorities
and on an equal footing.
But by this time, the
late 500's, early 600's,
the Jews were a persecuted minority
at the hands of the Christian empire
and were very frequently
unhappy and mistreated.
And indeed when the Byzantine
Empire did defeat the Iranians
and kick them back
out of the Near East,
they blamed probably hysterically --
but they blamed Byzantine Jews
for having collaborated
with the Iranians.
And so it is alleged
by later chroniclers
that the emperor Heraclius
actually forced baptism
on many of the Byzantine Jews.
These communities were in conflict.
Now I want to take you out of the
mainstream, away from the capitals
of Constantinople and
the Iranian capital
of Ctesiphon to a little backwater.
And that little backwater
is the western coast
of Arabia along the Red Sea.
Geographically it is
called the Tahama.
But the norther part of
it is called the Hijaz.
And there in 570 or so we think
Muhammad was born, Muhammad the son
of Abdullah from the
clan of Banu Hashim.
And what was distinctive about the
city in which he was born, Mecca,
was that it had a shrine, that
black cube-shaped building.
It was called the Kaaba and it
was already a shrine at that time.
It was a shrine as far
as I can tell to God.
That is to say the
Meccans had many deities.
They weren't monotheists, but they
seemed to have thought that most
of those deities were lesser.
And the most important deity
was the creator called God.
And the Qur'an talks about this.
It says if you ask them, the
Meccans, you know, about the divine,
they will say it is God, Allah.
Allah is not a personal name.
It just means God.
It's like the Greek theos.
They will say Allah is
God and he is the creator.
So they may have been
developing towards a kind
of monotheism, those
people in Mecca.
And this by the way is a big debate
in the late antique studies field,
some scholars have provocatively
argued that Platonists
and other pagans in the 500's
were tending towards monotheism
on their own.
So that they were saying
theos or God rather than Zeus,
and they were demoting the pantheon
of Greek gods to only
a kind of angel.
So this kind of thing may
have been going on in Mecca.
And politically what was distinctive
was that Mecca was no man's land.
It wasn't in the Iranian Empire and
it wasn't in the Byzantine Empire,
although I think it was
kind of on the fringes
of the Byzantine Empire more.
And it had occasionally been
part of the Roman Empire.
In fact Mark Antony
gave it to Cleopatra
as I guess dowry or something.
So Mecca had figured
in western history.
But it was a sanctuary.
The Arab tribes you know were
fractious and they were fighting.
And yet you know, you have tribes,
typically pastoral nomads in places
where there's a lot of marginal land
that you can't farm very easily.
But if you raise sheep and goats and
camels, you can just go around to
where the grass pops
up and feed them.
But marginal land isn't
very productive,
and so they have to do trade.
And there are things
you can't produce
in marginal land, like grain.
So you know, it's not good
for you not to eat wheat
and barley and those things.
Just to have a Bedouin diet
of milk and kebab, you know,
it's great, but you need the grain.
So they have to trade.
Mecca had to trade in
order to have foodstuffs,
but the tribe are always
fighting with each other.
There are feuds.
The Hatfield's and the
McCoy's kind of thing.
And however, they made certain
places like Mecca a sanctuary.
You're not allowed to
fight inside Mecca.
That would get you
thrown out of the town.
And the reason they gave
for it being a sanctuary
is it's a holy city.
Because the Kaaba is there.
That's the shrine of God.
And there probably
already was a sense
that the Kaaba had
been built by Abraham.
That was the Arab story about it.
And they also, being the
custodians of the Kaaba,
the Meccans were kind of holy.
So they were holy merchants.
And sometimes they would go trading
to other shrine cities wearing a
toga-like outfit that's called ahram
in Arabic.
So they were merchant-priests.
And so the young Muhammad
growing up in this type
of situation would have seen
that religion could function
to create areas of peace
where otherwise there
would be feuding and war.
And that it could make commerce
possible under some conditions.
Because the coriaceous custodians
of the Kaaba were respected
by the other tribes and so
their caravans were less likely
to be attacked.
Peace, worship, prosperity,
they were all wrought
up with one another for a Meccan.
There was, according to the early
sources, a movement of people
in Mecca and the Hijaz in this
period of spiritual restlessness.
And people were searching
for the one God.
Some of them ultimately
became Christians.
Some of them converted to Judaism,
and by the way, most Gemini's seemed
to have converted to Judaism.
And others were what these late
antique scholars are calling
pagan monotheists.
They were Platonists.
Or there was an entire cult of
a god called Theos Hypsistos,
the High God, Exalted God.
And that was an independent cult.
They thought there's just one,
although there might be other gods.
They were just lesser beings or
angels or demons or something.
And so that kind of search for
some sort of monotheism seems
to have been common in this period.
And Muhammad had been --
Abdullah who was a great merchant
of Mecca had been engaged
in it as well.
And so according to his third
wife and youngest wife Iesha,
she related it is said that then he
began liking solitude and he used
to go off alone to
the cave of Hirat.
He would perform devotions which
are a form of nocturnal worship
for many days before
returning to his family.
He would stock up on provisions,
then later return to Hadija.
That was his wife at the time, and
stock up again in the same way.
So Muhammad would routinely spend
a month of every year in this way
in between caravan journeys
up to Syria or down to Yemen.
And during that time he
would distribute food
to the poor and meditate.
And one night an angel visited,
according to the early
Islamic sources.
And there's a chapter of the
Qur'an, Qur'an 97, which comments
on that night when the
revelation first came.
You know, traditions say
that Muhammad said it was
like a bell rang in his mind
and when it stopped
ringing then he heard voices
and he remembered what
the voices had said.
They were verses of the
Qur'an, verses of scripture.
But in commenting on this
experience, the Qur'an 97 says
"In the name of God the
Merciful, the Compassionate,
behold we revealed it
on the Night of Power."
It being verses of the Qur'an.
And it says, "What will make you
understand the Night of Power?
The Night of Power is
better than 1,000 months.
The angels and the Spirit
descend then with the permission
of their Lord in every affair.
And peace it is, until
the breaking of the dawn."
Well remember I said in apocalyptic
literature there's always
angels involved.
And there's also a revelation
of the meaning of something.
So it says, "What will make you
understand the Night of Power?"
And then it mentions the angels.
This is an apocalyptic overtone.
And then the final verse is --
in my view it's a little bit,
this surah reminds me a little bit
of a haiku, the Japanese poetry.
Because in the last verse of the
haiku you're supposed to take things
in an unexpected direction, but
which builds on what came before.
And I think this chapter of the
Qur'an does this "And peace it is,
until the breaking of the dawn."
Well what's peace?
Peace in the original is feminine.
And the only feminine reference
in the verse is night, lihla.
So the night of revelation is peace.
And the night of revelation
is of course standing
for the revelation itself.
So the revelation is peace.
And you could interpret this
verse in a Quotidian way,
because Muhammad was staying
up late at night and praying.
So there was the peace of worship,
the inner peace of
communing with God.
The peace of the revelation coming.
But it could also be
that this is a metaphor
for the coming judgement day.
Peace it is until the breaking
of the dawn could be peace it is
until the judgement
day, the resurrection.
But in any case, I think this verse
is indicating that the revelation,
the Tanzeel that's mentioned
in the chapter is peace.
And then as I've said,
the Qur'an expects there
to be a judgement day,
a resurrection day.
And the people will be raised from
the graves and they will be judged.
And the wicked will be sent to hell
and that's really a horror story.
I won't go into it this afternoon.
We may not have the stomach for it.
But the good will go to
heaven, will go to the garden.
And when they get there, the Qur'an
says they are admitted to paradise
with a greeting, presumably the
angels are saying, "Enter in peace."
This is the day of eternity.
So the first thing that
happens when you go
to heaven is peace
is wished upon you.
And then the Qur'anic heaven has
been pointed out by many critics
as really a great place,
and you know,
I don't know if I could get
in, but if I had my choice,
this would be the one
I'd want to go to.
So it says at one point that
the foremost spiritual people
of the past.
And it says, by the way,
they're mostly ancients
and only a few moderns.
What that means is they're mostly
Jews and Christians, right?
And only a few Muslims.
So it's a multicultural
heaven that's being envisaged.
And it says that they're
sitting on ornamented thrones
and then reclining
on them face to face,
and immortal youths are constantly
serving them cups and goblets
and chalices filled to overflowing.
But it will not give them a
hangover or make them drunk.
And there will be fruit
platters from which to choose,
and whatever fowl they have appetite
for, and wide-eyed heavenly maidens
like hidden pearls as a
reward for their good deeds.
Therein they will hear no abusive
speech nor any talk of sin.
Only the saying, "Peace."
Peace. So of all of the delectations
of heaven as presented here,
the ultimate one is peace.
In another, chapter 36, it says
only a single cry will ring out.
That's the angel Gabriel blowing
the trumpet on the resurrection day.
"Then behold, they shall
all be gathered before me."
God is speaking.
"On that day no soul will
be in any way wronged,
and you will only receive the
just desserts of your deeds.
The dwellers in the garden on that
day will delight in their affairs.
They and their spouses will
repose on couches in the shade.
They will have fruit and
whatever they call for.
Peace. The word will reach them
from a compassionate Lord."
So I would argue this chapter
of the Qur'an envisages
heaven as having levels.
It's kind of like Dante's Pardiso.
And that you have bliss, repose,
enjoyment of heavenly fruit,
and then the highest level is
when God says to you, peace.
"The word will reach them
from a compassionate Lord."
Scholars have noted that
in this one it talks
about the spouses being
together in heaven.
So those guys you know who
are hoping for the virgins,
they should be reminded
that the wife will be along.
And so let me just make a
suggestion here that these images
of heaven are not unconnected
to earth.
That the Qur'an is modelling
human society for us.
And this vision of peace
after the resurrection,
the heavenly community is
a model for earthly life.
So paradise is imagined not
as a solitary experience,
because people are
talking to each other.
The inmates of heaven are
wishing peace upon one another,
and the angels are
wishing peace upon them.
And God is wishing peace upon them.
And they are surrounded by
delectations as a result
of this harmony and peace.
But it seems to me that if
the Qur'an is depicting peace
as so desirable, that it's the
ultimate reward of heaven bestowed
by the very voice of God, it views
peace as an ideal in this world
as well and that hell is therefore a
punishment for the unpeaceful life.
Beyond that, the gathering,
chapter 59 of the Qur'an has a verse
that says, "He is God, other
than whom there is no God.
The king, the holy, the peace, the
defender, the guardian, the mighty,
the omnipotent, the supreme."
The peace.
Peace is a name of God.
The names of God in the Qur'an and
in Muslim tradition are the virtues,
the attributes of the divine.
So God is peace.
Of course this is something that
occurs in the Bible as well.
Job says, "The dominion
and fear are with God.
He makes peace in his high heaven."
And in Hebrews 13:20 it
speaks of the God of peace.
So as God is peace, so too is the
fruit, the highest fruit of heaven.
Fred Donner at the University of
Chicago has argued in a recent book
that the early community around
Muhammad as far as we can tell
from the Qur'an, was not
sectarian in character.
But the people who gathered
around Muhammad and listened
to his preaching and supported him,
some of them were Christians,
some of them were Jews.
Some of them were pagan monotheists,
and some of them, you know,
were adherents or partisans of him,
what we would now call Muslims.
But the word that's used in the
Qur'an for them is believers.
Those are the ones who
followed Muhammad's teachings.
The word Muslim does
occur, but it's less exalted
as a station than being a believer.
The Muslims acquiesce.
They submit.
But the believers, you know, commit.
And so there's a later verse of the
Qur'an, the Qur'an 262, which says,
"Surely the believers and the Jews
and the Christians and the Sabians,
whoever believes in God in the
last day and works righteousness,
their reward awaits
them with their Lord.
And no fear shall be on them.
Neither shall they sorrow."
The Qur'an is promising
salvation to all the monotheists,
to the people who believe in the
one God and who do good works.
The Qur'an is more
Jamesian than it is Pauline.
It thinks that both faith
and works are necessary.
And this is -- I can't tell you
how remarkable this verse is,
because that's not how the
late antique world worked.
If you went a little bit north from
Mecca up into the Byzantine Empire
and you were with the patriarch
of Jerusalem or the patriarch
of Antioch or the patriarch of
Alexandria and you asked them,
you know, "Who's going to heaven?"
It wouldn't include this group.
It would only be the Christians
and maybe only a few of them.
You know, not the heretics
among the Christians.
So this is very unusual
that the Qur'an talks
about this kind of
universal salvation.
Of course it does exclude
the polytheists.
I would argue, you
know, this word Sabian,
now the Muslims have
forgotten what it meant.
Personally, you know, I blame them,
because wouldn't that be important.
Like if your scripture said,
"This group is going to heaven,
they're saved," wouldn't you
want to remember who they were?
I mean, that would be important.
But no, the later Muslim tradition
seems confused about this issue.
I think that they were
the pagan monotheists.
And I won't go into
the linguistic details.
But you know, there was no word for
monotheism at that time in Greek.
The believers, the people who had
good faith, were called ab sabia.
And the verb to be God-fearing
or to worship was sabo.
And I think it came into
Arabic as a lone word, sabia.
And so the people who were
God-fearing were the Sabians.
And that word occurs in the New
Testament like when Paul talks
about the good gentiles, the
pagans who worshiped in synagogue
with the Jews and were God-fearing.
That's the word that's used.
So I think there's a reason
to think the Sabians were the
pagan monotheists.
But in any case, all of them
are going to heaven apparently.
And so heaven is multicultural.
You know, aside from our conflict,
it's very much like
the United States.
The Christians, Jews, Muslims,
they're eating well, delectations.
They're not always good,
but the Qur'anic heaven
is not just for Muslims.
But there are also
the hostile pagans.
There were people in Mecca
who minded Muhammad's
message for various reasons.
One of them was that he
denounced some of their deities.
Apparently the Qur'an is all
right with them having deities,
as long as they would agree
that they're just angels.
There can't be any independent
sovereign power except the one God.
But they didn't always
agree to say that.
And then the Qur'an
also, it didn't think
that you could have female angels.
So some of the goddesses were
objectionable to the Qur'an.
And it has this verse in Qur'an 53,
"Then have you see Allah and Allozah
and Monat the Third, the other one.
Do you have then boys
and God only girls?"
That would be an entirely
unfair division.
"They are only names you have
given them, you and your ancestors.
God has revealed no
sovereignty thereby.
They only follow their assumptions
and the seductions of
their carnal souls.
But guidance has come to
them form their Lord."
So the goddesses were being
denounced by the Qur'an
and the Meccans seemed to have
really liked the goddesses.
The Meccans, the north Arabian
tradition didn't typically
have idols.
They were aniconic, or
they didn't have images.
They liked abstract art.
So that first image there on the
top is a batal or Lasab stone
which the goddess is
supposed to be in there.
But it doesn't have features.
And sometimes under the Greek
and Roman influence they would
put features on the batals
as you can see in the second one.
But those are being
denounced by the Qur'an.
And at that time there weren't that
many followers of Muhammad and Mecca
as a city was hostile
to the new prophet.
And so there were conflicts.
I would argue that the
conflicts weren't very severe,
because Mecca was a sanctuary.
No fighting in Mecca.
So they couldn't kill each other.
But the pagans in Mecca, according
to the Qur'anic sources
were just unpleasant.
Like really unpleasant.
They would boycott people,
refuse to marry their daughters.
In fact, Muhammad had two daughters
that were married to a pagan
and his father made them get
divorced, sent the girls back.
And then they would
socially boycott them.
And you know, since it was a trading
city, I think it's implied also
that there were economic
deficits to being boycotted.
And then you know, there are
stories that Muhammad was sitting
in the market one day and one of
the pagans, actually his uncle,
came and threw sheep innards on him.
And according to the
Muslim traditions, you know,
he just wiped them off and went on.
So a lot of the traditions, it's
interesting to me, depict Muhammad
and the early Muslims
as extremely nonviolent
in the way they replied
to this harassment.
And I find that this supported
by the verses of the Qur'an.
So during this time of
persecution in the 610's in Mecca,
the Qur'an says, "And if
they impugn your voracity,
say "to me my works
and to you your works.
You are not responsible for what
I do and I am not responsible
for what you do."" In other
words, live and let live.
The criteria in Qur'an 25 says,
"So do not obey the hostile pagans.
Rather struggle thereby
steadfastly against them."
So they're not supposed
to put their heads down.
They're not supposed to give in.
But they have this live and
let live kind of attitude.
By the way, this is one of
the first parts of the Qur'an
where the word Jihad appears.
The word struggle here is jihad.
This is [foreign words], struggle
steadfastly with it against them.
And the Muslim commentators are
very frank that with it means
with the Qur'an, with
peaceful discourse.
So jihad went on to
have other meanings.
But the Qur'anic meaning of it
here is disputation in a nice way
with people who don't agree.
Then the Qur'an in 28:50-57
contrasts the hostile pagans
with those Christians and
Jews who had recognized
that Muhammad was receiving
revelation from God.
The Qur'an doesn't insist
that people believe,
you know, become Muslims.
But it insists that they not
say that Muhammad is a liar,
that he is deliberately
falsifying things.
So those Christians and Jews who
said, "He seems to be a prophet.
He's getting revelations from
God," whether they joined
or not, they're being praised.
And because they were
associated with Muslims,
apparently the pagans
were bothering them too.
So the Qur'an says, "These
shall be given their wage twice
over because they patiently endured.
And they avert evil
with good and expend
of what we have provided them."
So they're generous, they do
philanthropy, and they're patient.
They endure taunting and harassment
with the Muslims from the pagans.
And they avert evil with good.
Does this remind you of anything?
I mean it's very much
like Jesus's principle
of turning the other cheek.
The Qur'an is praising them
for behavior in this way.
The believers face down evil
by performing good deeds rather
than by committing violence
or returning evil for evil.
And then in 28:55 it's talking
then about the believers,
about the people around
Muhammad himself.
"When they hear abusive talk,
they turn away from it and say,
"To us our deeds and to you yours.
Peace be upon you."
We do not seek out the unruly."
And again, peace be
upon you is a prayer.
It's calling on God
to give them peace.
This is to the people who are
taunting them and insulting them
and you know, it said that people
would throw thorns in their path.
So you know, if you
were walking barefoot,
suddenly your foot
would be bleeding.
Then Qur'an 25:63 it says, "And
the servants of the all merciful
who walk humbly upon the earth,
and when the ignorant taunt
them, they reply peace."
So in this period when the Muslims
are first starting out and they're
in the city of Mecca,
there is this --
you would have to say a very
Christian-like attitude towards
their persecutors.
Now later on, from 622, Muhammad
and the Muslims had to relocate.
They came under so much pressure
and the Qur'an complains about this,
that the Meccans were
trying to expel them.
That they had to go to a
nearby city, to Medina.
And once they went there, war
broke out between them and Meccans.
My own interpretation of this is
that actually the Meccans wanted
to get Muhammad and the
Muslims out of Mecca
because they couldn't
attack them there.
It was a sanctuary city.
So there was nothing they could
do to them as long as they were
in the city, except you
know, put social pressure
on them, or economic pressure.
But if they could get them out,
then they could attack them.
And I think they wanted to.
And so once the Muslims went
to Medina, war breaks out.
The Qur'an you know,
talks about fighting,
and the Muslims were
willing to fight
in what the Arabs considered
sacred months.
And when criticized for
fighting in the sacred month --
you're not supposed to fight --
the Qur'an says, "Yes, that's bad,
but it's not as bad as expelling
people from the sanctuary city."
And you know, there are some
crimes that are ancillary.
Like in the old west a horse
thief, if caught, would be hanged.
Why? Because if you
stole a man's horse,
you very likely were killing him.
I mean in the old west,
a man without a horse
out in the desert, that was death.
So people frowned on horse thieves.
In the same way, if you kicked
somebody out of a sanctuary city,
you were exposing them to attack.
And that's what the pagans
had done to the Muslims.
But even in the midst of
the conflict that emerged,
and there were three big
battles and some other raids,
the Qur'an has what I would argue
is a kind of theology of just war.
Similar to what exists in
Christianity, is often attributed
to St. Augustine of Hippo.
But our scholars have argued
that in Augustine it's not a
doctrine so much as some remark.
But later on, you know,
Aquinas and others worked on it.
But I think it's similar.
So the Qur'an in the second
chapter, 190 verse says,
"And combat in the way of God
against those who initiate combat
with you, but do not
commit aggression.
God does not love aggressors.
And slay those hostile combatants
wherever you overtake them."
This verse is often
taken out of context.
And if you go out on the internet or
you listen to people who have an ax
to grind talking about
Islam, they will say,
"Well see the Qur'an says slay
them wherever you overtake them.
It's commanding Muslims just to
go out and randomly kill people."
Not what's going on in the verse.
The referent of those is the
ones who attack the Muslims.
So it's an argument
for self-defense.
And moreover, because it says
fight the ones that fight you,
it implicitly, and Muslim
scholars have noted this,
you are not to fight noncombatants.
So women, children, noncombatant
men are not to be attacked.
And St. Augustine said, "When
you are arming for battle,
the will should be concerned for
peace and necessity with war.
War is waged in order
to attain peace."
It's very much what
the Qur'an is saying.
Because in 861 it says that, "If the
enemy sues for peace on just terms,
the overture should be accepted.
And if they incline to peace,
then you should incline to it.
And put your trust in God.
He is the all-hearing,
the all-knowing."
So if the enemy is fighting you
and they come to you and say, "No,
we've decided to call
it off," according
to the Qur'an you have
to call it off.
And it is worth noting
that in history actually,
according to Muslim tradition,
the conflict between Medina
and Mecca was resolved
with a treaty ultimately.
Mecca was not actually
militarily conquered in the end.
I think there's probably
an apocalyptic context
for these Qur'anic
ideas about peace.
In 614 Jerusalem fell
to the Iranians.
General Shahrbaraz of
Iran took Jerusalem.
And this just -- I mean colloquially
speaking I could say it freaked
people out.
Because Jerusalem since the
time of Constantine, you know,
had been in the hands of
the Christian Roman Empire.
And now it was not.
And the monks and clerics who
wrote about the Iranian occupation
of Jerusalem appear
to have exaggerated
substantially the horrors of it.
Because the Israeli archaeologists
have been digging quite a lot
in Jerusalem and they
got down to that level.
And according to the Byzantine
sources, the Iranians burned
down all the churches and
they killed 90,000 people.
And you know, there should be bones
down there or ashes and things
like that if the city had been
subjected to that kind of ravaging.
But they don't find that.
It goes along that
layer is prosperous,
the next layer is prosperous,
seems to go on.
No sign of the churches.
The Church of the Holy
Sepulcher doesn't seem
to have been burned down.
So the literary sources from the
Byzantine side are just incorrect.
But it was a big shock for
the Christian Roman Empire
to lose Jerusalem to the
Iranians who were not Christians.
They belonged to the Zoroastrian
religion, didn't recognize Christ.
And they did carry off the relic
of the True Cross which was
in the Church of the Holy
Sepulcher in Jerusalem,
to Ctesiphon in what
is now Amadiya in Iraq.
And so it was a really kind of --
Khosrau II of Iran
was really sticking it
to the emperor of Byzantium,
Heraclius.
He was saying, "Take that."
Now what's interesting is the
Qur'an talks about all this.
And it says in chapter 30,
"Byzantium lies vanquished
in the nearest province.
But in the wake of their defeat,
they will triumph after a few years.
Before and after, it is
God who is in command.
On that day, the believers will
rejoice in the victory of God.
He causes to triumph whoever he will
and he is the mighty, the merciful.
It is the promise of God.
God does not break his promises,
but most people do not know it."
Now this verse in my view has
been completely misinterpreted
by the later Muslim commentators.
Because they don't take
it seriously enough.
This verse is saying
that the victory
of the Roman Caesar Heraclius
over Iran is God's victory.
And it says that the believers,
the people around Muhammad,
will rejoice at that victory.
Well, two decades later the
Muslim Arabs defeated Byzantium
and took over Assyria.
So from the point of view
of two decades later,
this verse is a little
bit of an embarrassment.
Because it's making
Heraclius a big hero.
It's saying that God was with him.
And then by the 630's the
Muslims are fighting Heraclius.
They are saying that Heraclius had
a nervous breakdown about that.
But I think that in the context
of the 610's, this is a statement
that the Muslim God is universal.
And you know, this is not
unprecedented, because in Isaiah,
Cyrus the Great Iranian Achaemenid
king is called the anointed one
of Israel.
So just as Yahweh is
a universal God,
so the God of the Qur'an
is universal
and can acknowledge the Roman
Emperor as his instrument.
But that the believers would rejoice
in his victory suggests
to me something more.
I think at that point
the political theology
of the Qur'an envisaged
the Muslim Arabs as joining
in some way the Byzantine
commonwealth.
You know, maybe as citizens.
Because Byzantium did
have claims on the Hijaz.
Or maybe in the same way
that the Ethiopians did
when the Ethiopians were
generally allied with the Romans.
But it seems very clear to me
the Qur'an is making a stand
against Iran and the
Zoroastrian empire.
And is being partisan for Byzantium.
Now the later Muslim
commentators will say things like,
"Well this is a prediction that the
Muslims will have a great victory
in the same year that
Heraclius does."
But that's not what the verse says.
There isn't any reason
to interpret it that way.
Then in a similar period of time
there is a verse that maintains
that Muhammad had a vision in which
he travelled by night to Jerusalem.
And in the context of this
other verse it seems to me
that in the context of
the apocalyptic literature
about Jerusalem, because it's a
symbol for the afterlife, for peace,
if you read the Book of Revelation,
that Muhammad is re-appropriating
occupied Jerusalem spiritually
from the Iranian Empire
in that night journey.
Now there's a Jewish piece of
writing from the same basic period
by a contemporary of the Qur'an,
but writing a little bit later
after Iran was defeated, which
says that in this apocalyptic piece
of writing, the [foreign word],
that a celestial Jerusalem
will descend from heaven.
Its house, gates and thresholds will
be constructed of precious stones.
And within its restored temple will
be treasures including the Torah,
the first five books of the
Hebrew Bible, and peace.
Torah and peace will be in the new
Jerusalem that descends from heaven.
And this author sites Psalms, "Great
peace have those who love your law,
and nothing can make them stumble."
I haven't completely put
all this together yet,
but I think that the
Iranian conquest
of Jerusalem was a big spiritual
crisis not only for the Byzantines,
but for Muhammad's believers.
And you know, there was a point
at which the believers
prayed toward Jerusalem.
And that there's some kind of
apocalyptic expectation of a defeat
of the Persians and
then what comes next.
And it might even be a kind
of civil millenarianism
that the Muslim Arabs would
then be able to exceed
to the victorious Byzantine
commonwealth.
So in conclusion, I'm arguing
that revelation, Tanzeel,
is identified with peace
in the Night of Power.
That members of all religions
revering the one God,
according to the Qur'an,
will go to paradise.
That Christians and Jews who accept
that Muhammad was a prophet
are praised for fighting evil
through good and through
wishing peace on enemies.
That the early Muslims are
also praised for wishing peace
on those who harassed them.
That they are commanded
to make peace
with hostile combatants
wherever the hostiles sue for it.
That the good of all religions
are greeted on arrival in heaven
with wishes of peace and well-being,
both by angels and one another
and by God himself, that the
highest level of paradise is
when God wishes you peace.
And that the peace is one of the key
attributes, names of God himself.
And that those people who can
read the Qur'an and see it only
as a violent document are missing
out on the parts that I read.
Thank you very much.
[ Applause ]
Well, anybody who talks at
you for 50 minutes ought
to take some questions
and let you be satisfied
about your objections,
doubts and so forth.
Let's have short -- and there
should be a question in it please.
Short responses.
And please wait until the
microphone gets to you
because this is being recorded.
>> My name is [inaudible].
I'm Iraqi-American.
And you just mentioned the
vision of the prophet Muhammad
of his going to Jerusalem.
And there I've met
many Muslim scholars
who said this verse might have
bene inserted by the [foreign name]
in order to legitimize the
Islamic conquer of Jerusalem.
Some Islamic conspiracy theorists
blame it on the Jewish conspiracy
to legitimize the Muslim
presence in Jerusalem.
First of all I'd like you
to comment on this theory.
And many theories like this which
for example negate the necessity
for hijab in Islam or alcohol
is not necessarily prohibited.
Even in [inaudible] which I grow up
and I was born next to in Baghdad,
they do not prohibit
alcohol for example.
But the environmental
feel in the Arab world
and the Muslim world refuses for
any idea, even if it's a crazy idea,
to be proposed and
negotiated or discussed.
And I'd like your comment
on this issue too.
Thank you.
>> Juan Cole: Thank you very much.
I know your writing,
and thanks for coming.
Listen, yeah, this is
an important question.
Because when we talked
about the text of the Qur'an
from a western academic point
of view, and even as you said,
among some traditional Muslim
scholars, this whole question
of is the Qur'an that we now have --
how much of it goes back
to the time of the prophet?
Is it really from his
lifetime and so forth?
And there's a whole school of
academic scholars in the west
that come out of typically SOAS
in Britain, which doesn't think
that you can trust
any of these sources.
That the chronicles
and the biographies
and so forth we have are you
know the earliest manuscripts
that we can date, and the dates of
the authors are you know, from 150,
200, 300 years after
the time of the prophet.
So that makes a person
nervous as a historian.
Because you know, I can't remember
what I had for dinner last week.
And depending on people for a memory
of 300 years before
is pretty dangerous.
And then there's been arguments
that the Qur'an was produced by more
than one hand and over time.
And for any of the
more pious Muslims
in the audience, I apologize.
I don't mean to offend you, but this
is what the scholars have proposed.
I am a conservative on this issue.
I think the Qur'an came
through the prophet Muhammad.
And I think that the traditional
dating of it, 610-632 --
you could tinker with it,
but it's just about right.
And I find contemporary
things being referred to.
Like we know when the Byzantines
were defeated by the Iranians and so
that verse which talks about
it must be from 614, 615.
It must be from that period.
So there is now some evidence
for the integrity of the Qur'an
and for the traditional dating
coming out of manuscript work.
But in the 1980's I went to Yemen
and they have a manuscript
repository in Yemen which, you know,
for any historian it's
just wonderful.
But they found these old, old, old,
Qur'ans in the Great
Mosque in Yemen.
And they brought in the Germans
to assemble them and study them.
And I talk to Ursula Dreibholtz
who is in charge of this project.
And she said, "We're quite convinced
that some of these, you know,
the papyrus, the script,
they look to us 7th century."
And then one of them turned
out to be a palimpsest.
Palimpsest is in the old days, you
know, paper or papyrus and so forth.
Parchment was expensive.
People would write over things.
So they found one of these
Qur'ans which was in the 650's,
the Caliph Uthman published
a standard Qur'an
which is all the printed
Qur'ans you have are from that.
That underneath the standard
Qur'an was an earlier one.
And they radio carbon dated it.
And you know, you don't get exact
figures from radio carbon dating,
but you get percentage likelihoods.
Percentage likelihood
of this one, 645.
And it's not the standard recension.
The order of the chapters
is slightly different.
Not a lot of -- you know,
there are variations,
but not a lot of significant ones.
But if we now have a
Qur'an 645, the likelihood
of the text we have being integral
is much higher than it used to be.
There's also been a find
in Paris at Birmingham
of 16 pages of the Qur'an.
Two of them have been carbon
dated and they came back 570-640.
570 would be a challenge because we
think that's when Muhammad was born.
But in any case, that's a parchment.
The animal that that
Qur'an was written on lived
at the same time as
the prophet Muhammad.
We're quite sure about this.
Now could somebody have
used an old parchment
and written out the Qur'an on it?
Maybe. We don't know.
These things haven't been settled.
But I would just signal that the
extreme skepticism and this sort
of SOAS school that wanted to see
the Qur'an as a tradition that grew
up over maybe two centuries,
that's increasingly implausible.
The Qur'an we have is I think
ballpark for the period.
And so I think we can
approach it this way.
So I don't know if the surah
Isra is in the palimpsest.
It's been published.
I should take a look.
But I think probably it really
is a vision of Jerusalem.
And I'm arguing it makes sense
because I think maybe there
was a dialogue in Mecca
that the pagan Meccans might
have been siding with Iran.
And Muhammad was talking up
the Holy Land and the prophets
of Jerusalem and Jesus and Moses.
And the pagans might well have
been saying to him, "Well,
your Jerusalem is gone, isn't it?
It's in the hands of the
fire worshipers now."
And so I think maybe
having a vision of it
in which Jerusalem inspires
the prophet is a way
of spiritually pushing
back against that line.
You guys decide who
gets the question.
>> Thank you for your talk.
I don't know if you're read
Graham Wood in the Atlantic,
which I imagine was
very pedestrian for you.
But he essentially argues
that groups like ISIS try
to hasten the coming
of the apocalypse
through I guess war mechanisms.
And you've argued quite
convincingly today
that the Qur'an is you
know, a text of peace.
But I guess the question is, is
war and conflict a prerequisite
to get to an eventual peace?
And is that allowed?
Thank you.
>> Juan Cole: Well in
apocalyptic literature of the time,
it's quite frequently the case
that it is the seer foresees a war
and conflict before peace can come.
And this is the shape of the Book
of Revelation or the Book of Daniel.
And there are a number of
contemporary works both
by Christians and Jews of the time
of Muhammad which have that shape.
I don't find it in the Qur'an.
I don't find this expectation
of a conflict preceding
the outbreak of peace.
Because even before the
conquest of Jerusalem,
as the German scholar Noldek
[spelling assumed] dated the
chapters at least, the Qur'an
is already laying out the schema
where there's revelation,
there's a warning.
There's signs of the
coming of the apocalypse
and then there's the judgement
day and the resurrection.
And those chapters don't really
bring up anything about war.
The signs of the resurrection or the
judgement day, the end of the world
in the Qur'an tend to be natural.
So that will be a day on which you
know, the mountains are like wool
that you carted from a sheep and
will just be blown by the wind.
And the stars will fall
and lose their brightness.
So the signs in the Qur'an
for the judgement day aren't
typically the marching of armies.
And one of the early verses which
does have a social content says
that will be the day on
which the unborn child,
the unborn girls will
ask why was she killed?
And you know, in premodern
societies --
or the newborn girls I meant to say.
In premodern societies,
female infanticide was
a birth control method.
And archaeologists in Egypt have
found large numbers of you know,
babies basically who
were killed in this way.
An anthropologist will
tell you that the fertility
of a group is determined by
the number of women in it.
And so if a famine has come,
if it's hard days and so forth,
people at that time would
often kill their girl children,
their girl babies.
And the Qur'an remonstrates
with them.
It think that this is very evil.
So the feminist corner of the
Qur'an that's defending the girls.
But it says that on the resurrection
day, you know, the babies will ask,
"What did we do to deserve this?"
So that's the major social
intervention that I can think
of with regard to the
apocalypse in the Qur'an.
So no, with regard to ISIL, a lot of
those guys were ex-Bothe military.
I don't know if you've ever hung
around with ex-Bothe military,
but I don't think they
know how to pray.
And they like a good stiff
glass of whiskey, am I right?
[ Inaudible ]
Yeah, Abu Bakr, the leader
of ISIL does have a PhD,
but a lot of those guys with him,
they're just dusted
off Bothe officers.
So I think they're manipulating
you know Islam for their purposes.
Yeah, I don't think
it's sincere with them.
And some of the rank and
file might be sincere,
but you know we've had a chance now
to study ISIL a little
bit academically.
There have been exit interviews,
because you know, people have left.
Leaving is chancy because
if they figure
out you're leaving
they will kill you.
But some people manage to get out.
And then anthropologists and
researchers have gone and talked
to them about what was
it like and so forth.
And they find these
people who have escaped,
they often didn't know very much
about Islam in a formal sense.
So the idea that Graham Wood put
forward in this Atlantic article
that you know, ISIL is very Islamic,
I don't know what he meant by that.
And in fact, that seems
to me very essentialist.
Like what would it mean
to be very Islamic?
Are some things more
Islamic than others
in some kind of essential sense?
Certainly they think
they're Muslims,
but you know those snake handlers
in the south think that
they're Christians.
Most of us, I wouldn't
want to argue with them
that they're not Christians,
but we don't typically think
that snake handling is in
fact central to Christianity,
even though this group
maintains that that's so.
So I think that the ISIL
people are more the equivalent
of the snake handlers than Islam.
They have a very peculiar
set of ideas
of what makes for being
a good Muslim.
And I don't know how you
reconcile the things that they do
with the text of the Qur'an.
You're only supposed
to fight combatants.
Well, they don't just
fight combatants.
They kidnap ordinary innocent
people and behead them.
That's not Qur'anic.
So to the extent that I'm
comfortable with putting my finger
on some normative elements
of the Qur'an,
they don't seem to accord with them.
So you know, I don't know.
I studied religion
as an undergraduate,
and in religious studies we
don't typically say things
like something is very,
very Buddhist.
That seems not to be a
useful way of thinking.
>> Unfortunately because of
timing we can only take one more.
>> Thank you.
I'd like to get back to the Mirage,
the vision of the trip to Jerusalem.
And basically in Qur'an
Jerusalem is not mentioned at all.
The trip was to El Mastrida
Alexa, the furthest mosque.
And the Alexa mosque in Jerusalem
wasn't even built until after 700.
So how and when did that
get connected to Jerusalem?
>> Juan Cole: Well,
that's a good question,
as of course the Qur'an is often
illusive and we are interpreting it
to say what we think it means.
But here's my argument for it.
You remember that verse I mentioned
about Byzantium being defeated
in the nearest province?
It says El Ardna Altna,
the nearest province.
Then when it's talking about El
Mastrida Alexa, it's the farthest.
Nearest, farthest.
Now let me just show you the map.
If you look at this map,
Mecca is in the Hijaz.
If you go north into Byzantine
Syria, that's the nearest province.
And they used to go up to Gaza which
was the port on the Mediterranean.
If you keep going up to Gaza,
that would be the farthest
province you could get
to before you got to the sea.
So I think the mastrid, which is
the farthest, is in Jerusalem.
And the word mastrid,
it doesn't mean mosque.
We're talking 614 here,
or something.
There were no mosques.
And it is a Semitic word which
means something like altar.
The pagans and those blocks that
I showed you would sacrifice
at the bottom of the block.
There would be a mastrid
or an altar.
My guess is that what's
being referred
to is the Basilica I Essene,
the Church of Holy Zion.
Which was the only religious
structure anywhere near the temple
mount at the time Muhammad
was talking.
Because of course the temple itself
had been destroyed by the Romans
and then there were
some synagogues up there
which were destroyed
by the Christians.
And so the only religious edifice
anywhere near the temple mount
on the western hill was the Basilica
of Holy Zion which was a place
of pilgrimage and was
associated with some
of the events of Jesus's life.
And I think -- a little
bit speculative on my part,
but I'm going to put it forward --
that the Qur'an sees a connection
between the Kaaba in Mecca
and the Basilica in Jerusalem.
And that this is an
axis and that's why
for a while they prayed
towards Jerusalem.
And then they switched to
praying towards the Kaaba.
But both of them are worthy
of being the point of prayer
and have a spiritual
connection between them.
And I think the Qur'an refers
to Jerusalem as the Holy Land,
and it also obviously feels
that Mecca is the Holy Land.
So I think there's a kind of
sacred geography at work here.
And that's how I would see it.
>> Janice Hyde: I just
want to remind everyone
that this program will be available.
There's lots of food
for thought here,
so I think we'll all want
to look at this again.
So in a few weeks, make
sure you check back
on our website to see this program.
But you can visit it in the meantime
to see other programs
similar to this.
I would like to thank you all
for coming very much today.
Please join us for some refreshment.
But first, please thank
our speaker, Dr. Juan Cole.
[ Applause ]
>> This has been a presentation
of the Library of Congress.
Visit us at LOC.gov.