Re: Hagarism
Posted: Tue Aug 19, 2014 9:14 am
Fighting and civil war based on Damascus! Not much theology!
Investigating the roots of western civilization (ye olde BC&H forum of IIDB lives on...)
https://earlywritings.com/forum/
http://www.scribd.com/doc/27096936/Haga ... amic-World
Whence Islam?
closely associated with Abraham and his faith: by borrowing a word which meant 'pagan' in the vocabulary of the Fertile Crescent, and using it to designate an adherent of an unsophisticated Abrahamic monotheism, the Hagarenes contrived to make a religious virtue of the stigma of their pagan past.
At the same time we can discern in this trend the beginnings of the far-reaching reorientation whereby the origins of Islam came to be seen in an elaborate and organic relationship to a real or imagined pagan heritage.The religion of Abraham provided some sort of answer to the question how the Hagarenes could enter the monotheist world without losing their identity in either of its major traditions. But in itself it was too simple and threadbare a notion to generate the basic religious structures which such a will to independence required.
The faith which had most to offer the Hagarenes at this level was Samaritanism. The Samaritans had faced the problem of dissociation from Judaism before the Christians, and without ever being absorbed by them.They had also solved the problem in a style very different from that of the Christians, and a good deal more relevant to the immediate needs of the Hagarenes; where the Christians sublimated the Judaic categories into metaphor,the Samaritans replaced them with concrete alternatives.
Given this basic affinity, a Hagarene reception of Samaritan ideas was facilitated conceptually by the prominence of Moses in both Judeo-Hagarismn and Samaritanism, and politically by the very innocuousness of the Samaritan community.
The earliest Hagarene borrowing from the Samaritans of which we have evidence is their scriptural position. At one point in the disputation between the patriarch and the emir referred to above, the emir demands to be told how it is that, if the Gospel is one, the Christian sects differ among themselves in matters of belief. The patriarch replies:
Just as the Pentateuch is one and the same, and is accepted by us Christians and by you Mahgraye, and by the Jews and the Samaritans, and each community is divided in faith;so also with the faith of the Gospel, each heresy understands and interprets it differently.
Hagarism is thus classed as a Pentateuchal religion.
Later the discussion shifts to the divinity of Christ and his status as son of God, and the emir demands proof from the Pentateuch. The patriarch replies with a barrage of unspecified scriptural citations, the weight of which was clearly prophetic. It is the emir's reaction at this point that is crucial:
The illustrious emir did not accept these from the prophets, but demanded [that] Moses[be cited] to prove to him that the messiah was God.
To accept the Pentateuch and reject the prophets is the Samaritan scriptural position
With regard to the manner of composition,there is some reason to suppose that the Koran was put together out of a plurality of earlier Hagarene religious works. In the first place, this early plurality is attested in a number of ways. On the Islamic side, the Koran itself gives obscure indications that the integrity of the scripture was problematic, and with this we may compare the allegation against 'Uthmn that the Koran had been many books of which he had left only one.
On the Christian side, the monk of BetHale distinguishes pointedly between the Koran and the ..... while Levond has the emperor Leo describe how Hajjj destroyed the old Hagarene 'writings'.
Secondly, there is the internal evidence of the literary character of the Koran. The book is strikingly lacking in overall structure,frequently obscure and inconsequential in both language and content, perfunctory in its linking of disparate materials, and given to the repetition of whole passages in variant versions. On this basis it can plausibly be argued that the book is the product of the belated and imperfect editing of materials from a plurality of traditions.
WikiThe Battle of Tours (October 732),[27] also called the Battle of Poitiers
Now if the southern Arabs were different, how do you know, and how do you know they played a role in the development of Islam?1. The aversion and contempt for writing of the northern Arabs at the time of the J?hiliyyah
52. In another rather suggestive passage, Leo remarks on the Hagarene disparagement of the Gospels andprophets on the ground that they are falsified, and proceeds to base his argument on a series of scripturalcitations which, he stresses, are from the Pentateuch (
ibid
., tr. Patkanian, pp. 45f = tr. Jeffery, pp. 299f).Note also the Samaritan ring of the Hagarene insinuation detected by Leo that Ezra falsified the scriptures(
ibid
., tr. Patkanian, p. 38 = tr. Jeffery, p.289).
165
Notes to pp. 15-17
53. Compare also the absence of mention of the prophets in the statement of a 1ate Syriac sourcethat Muhammad 'accepted Moses and his book, and accepted the Gospel ... .' (J.-B. Chabot (ed.and tr.),
Chronicon ad annum Christi
1234
pertinens
(= CSCO. Scriptores Syri. vols. xxxvif,lvi). Louvain 1916 etc., pp. 229 = 179; contrast the parallel version of Michael the Syrian,
Chronique,
vol. iv, p. 406 = vol. ii, p. 404. where the prophets are duly included).54. Samaritanism also suggested concrete alternatives which will be considered in Chapter 4.55. It is not clear whether we are to think of the Torah which 'Abdallh b. 'Amr b: al·'•s readalongside the
Furq•n
(Kister, 'Haddith', p. 231), and the
twrb
(
sic
. not
Orayta
) which the monkof Bet Hale cites alongside the Koran and other works as a source of law (see below. p. 167, n.14), as some sort of Arabic targum. There is no trace of one in the disputation between thepatriarch and the emir (Nau. 'Colloque'. especially pp. 25