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Muhammad ʿAbduh, rida explains that Jews abandoned many of the
original torah’s laws while adding others that were never commanded.
For instance, the torah “prohibited them from lying, harming people,
and taking usury,” but, insists rida (citing ʿAbduh), Jews commit all
these offenses. Similarly, “their scholars and leaders added many re-
ligious laws, ceremonies, and customs, to which they [Jews] adhere,
even though they are not in the torah nor are they known from Moses,
peace be upon him.”^99 the Jews’ torah is a corrupted text, argues rida,
and the religious practice that developed among Jews in the subse-
quent generations veered significantly from that which was originally
mandated by God.
as before, but now in a more systematic way, rida’s assault on the au-
thenticity and divinity of the torah blends traditional Islamic polemics
with contemporary european biblical criticism. he refers, for example,
to the relationship between the Bible and hammurabi’s Code (which
european egyptologists had unearthed less than a decade earlier in
persia). In the very same paragraph, rida rehearses the accusation that
the Jews removed references to Muhammad that had been found in the
original torah.^100 Later in the article, rida cites the writings of rahmat
allah al- hindi (1818– 1891), an Indian Muslim biblical critic^101 who in
turn relied on the work of, among others, the British Methodist biblical
scholar adam Clarke (1762– 1832). rida explains Clarke’s theory that
marginal notes written by subsequent readers of the torah came to be
incorporated into the text itself by even later readers who were un-
aware of the marginalia’s original purpose; these additions came to be
regarded as original elements of the torah.^102 rida further highlights
the theories that attribute to ezra the Scribe many explanatory phrases
found in the torah and insists that the taḥrīf (corruption) of the bibli-
cal text is abundantly clear from the many cases of Babylonian terms
found in the text. the presence of these terms is taken as evidence that
the biblical text could not have been completed before the Babylonian
exile.^103 rida’s critique of Judaism and the Jews’ torah is an eclectic
assortment of conventional polemical tropes known from the earliest
Jewish- Islamic religious encounter along with modern european aca-
demic perspectives that together, in rida’s mind, undermined contem-
porary Jews’ claim to an authentic book of God.
(^99) al-Manār 13:10 (November 1910), 723.
(^100) Ibid., 724.
(^101) the work cited here is rahmat allah ibn Khalil ar- rahman [al- hindi], Iẓhāral-
ḥaqq (Cairo, 1877).
(^102) al-Manār 13:10 (November 1910), 727. See Clarke, The Holy Bible, Containing the
Old and New Testaments.
(^103) al-Manār 13:10 (November 1910), 727.