The Convergence of Judaism and Islam. Religious, Scientific, and Cultural Dimensions

150 r Ronald C. Kiener

ascent experiences of legendary biblical or rabbinic figures, and many of
them contain episodes that are repeated, sometimes in great detail, in
either Christian or Islamic “tours of heaven.”
While throughout the era of merkabah mysticism the problem of cre-
ation was not of paramount importance, the treatise Sefer Yesirah (Book
of Creation, hereafter SY) represents an attempt at cosmogony, tinged
with a merkabah milieu. The proposals for dating this anonymous text
have ranged anytime between the first and ninth centuries, and it is never
cited until the tenth. It features a linguistic theory of creation in which
God creates the universe by combining the twenty-two letters of the He-
brew alphabet, along with the ten numerals, or sefirot.
Researchers David Halperin and Gordon Newby have done the most
to recover hints of merkabah mysticism in early Islam. In his book Faces
of the Chariot, Halperin has provided a fascinating appendix that recounts
numerous reverberations of merkabah imagery in tafsir and hadith and
possibly in the Qur’an itself. More recently, Halperin has adduced a
variety of striking parallels between merkabah accounts and Shi ̔ite de-
scriptions of Muhammad’s mi ̔raj.^6 Newby in particular tried to situ-
ate variations of merkabah mysticism in the Hijaz environment of
Muhammad’s day. It should be argued here against the most astonishing
claim these two have made; namely, that the Jews of the seventh-century
Hijaz were “greatly interested in mysticism” and that Muhammad prac-
ticed certain ritual acts which reeked of Jewish merkabah mystical prac-
tice, particularly with reference to the heavenly ascension of Muhammad,
the mi ̔raj.
It seems to me simple common sense that when we use the Qur’an or
hadith to infer as to the religious trends of the Arabian Jews, we ought to
regard the results of our efforts with a healthy bit of skepticism. In many
ways, a description of Arabian Judaism from Arabic and Islamic sources
would be akin to describing first-century Rabbinic Judaism from the syn-
optic gospels.
With that in mind, we take the hadith and tafsir concerning merkabah-
like practices in Muhammad’s day as evidence of merkabah awareness in
the third century ah, but not in the first. By the time Islam had settled
into the lands of the great Jewish communities north of Arabia, merkabah
became a real religious phenomenon worthy of Islamic interest, and it is
not before the ninth century that these images first appear in the exegeti-
cal literature.