Muhammad, the Qur\'an & Islam

Muhammad, the Qur'an and Islam

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validity for Hamlet, and his audience certainly expects

neither of these.

2) As a piece of entertainment, Shakespeare's Hamlet

remains a great play in the opinion of many, even after

the sources of its plot have been found.

3) With respect to Hamlet, "the creative processes in

Shakespeare's mind" can only be realized by comparing

the sources to his production and then noting all of the

modifications which Shakespeare himself made.

As opposed to Shakespeare's Hamlet, the Qur'an not only claims historicity
and validity, but it also professes to be God's Word. It is indeed the
magnitude of these claims which warrants serious investigation of both the
text of the Qur'an and its possible sources. Furthermore, as the development
of Islamic tradition indicates, one's knowledge of Muhammad's life and the
earliest stages of Islam is greatly enhanced by practically any aspect of
Qur'anic research.

This present work discusses and references the findings and theories of
many generations of scholars concerning the possible sources of the Qur'an.
Nevertheless, the conclusive evaluation of these materials is left to each
individual reader.

One non-Qur'anic illustration of how source information can be employed
in a theological sense, may be found in the development of traditions
surrounding the Old Testament priest Zachariah, the son of Jehoiada: In II
Chr. 24:21f the priest Zachariah is shown as having been murdered in the
court of the Temple at Jerusalem as he called for the Lord's vengeance. This
request of Zachariah was then at least partially fulfilled when Joash, the
king who had ordered Zachariah's killing, was murdered by his own
servants (II Chr. 24:25). As an apparent exegetical elaboration on Ezek.
24:7f, Jewish rabbis claimed that Zachariah's death was ave^3 nged by the
Babylonian Nebuzaradan during the destruction of Jerusalem in the time of
Nebuchadnezzar. The apocryphal Protevangelion, which was u^4 sed by sects
that had broken off from Christianity, seems to have confused Zachariah,
the son of Jehoiada, with Zacharias, the father of John the Baptist in a story
similar to the Jewish legends. The Islamic accounts, whose p^5 lots are even
more dependent on the Jewish traditions about vengeance for Zachariah,