Muhammad heard verses allegedly recited by the angel Gabriel. When, as instructed, he had recited these revealed verses aloud, his followers repeated them, then wrote them down.
Jaan the Shoemaker hears an inner voice speaking of transcendence. Poul Anderson could simply have imagined the founder of a future religion. Other examples are:
Selador in Anderson's Starfarers;
the Daughter of Man and the Divine Child in Olaf Stapledon's Last And First Men;
Frank Herbert's Dune Messiah.
However, Aycharaych has the technological ability to fake the voice in Jaan's head: almost literally diabolical, especially since Aycharaych claims that his dupe benefits from this deception.
12 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
And the mere existence of the Yemeni or San'a texts of the Koran, with its variations, makes me even more skeptical of the story given of how the Koran was "revealed" and preserved.
I agree, what Aycharaych did to the unfortunate Jaan was truly diaboloical! Interestingly, Aycharaych also seems to have given Jaan at least some degree of telepathy himself.
To your list of science fictional religions I can only think of adding Stirling's cult of the Peacock Angel, from his book THE PESHAWAR LANCERS. And that was a truly ghastly and EVIL religion!
Ad astra! Sean
Sean,
Good morning. I am eating breakfast and trying to compose an early morning post.
Paul.
Kaor, Paul!
And by contrast, I'm far too often a night owl! (Smiles)
I've tried to think of a science fictional religion like the ones you listed that was not like the hideous cult of the Peacock Angel. But nothing really comes to mind (Asimomv's cult of the Galactic Spirit was a fraud cooked up by the Mayor of Termimus).
Ad astra! Sean
Sean,
Jorn the Apostle and the Warriors of God in James Blish's THE TRIUMPH OF TIME.
Paul.
Kaor, Paul!
Or the Johannine Church in Anderson's OPERATION CHAOS. And not all of its believers were knowing dupes of the Adversary. But that's not much better than Stirling's religion of the Peacock Angel.
Ad astra! Sean
The Koran was probably not written during Mohammed's lifetime; the eventual "standard" version was compiled in Ummayad times in Damascus,
Until then what Mohammed had said was conveyed orally. A good deal of the "final" version seems to incorporate a lot of Aramaic Gospel-based stuff -- Arabic wasn't a written language, and you can see influences from written Aramaic in the Koran; Aramaic was a closely related Semitic language, but distinct from Arabic and some of the "obscure" parts of the Koran are actually bad translations from Aramaic. Eg., the angel addressing the Virgin Mary, and the "virgins" which greet souls in Paradise (actually grapes, in the original).
Wow. A real difference between Koranic scholarship and Muslim doctrine.
The Biblical influence is obvious despite Muslims saying that Judaeo-Christian documents were not around in Muhammad's place and time.
Kaor, Paul!
It's even more complicated than that! A mercantile trading town like Mecca in Mohammed's early years would have had many different kinds of people staying or passing thru. Including Jews, orthodox and heretical Christians, Zoroastrians, and the local pagans, of course.
My understanding of the "Biblical" influences on what became the Koran is that they came mostly from APOCRYPHAL sources, not directly from the Bible. And since ruins of Christian churches has been found in Arabia, I don't believe it when Muslims say that OT and NT texts were not to be found there in Mohammed's time. Because readings from the OT and NT are prominent parts of the Catholic liturgy.
Ad astra and Merry Christmas! Sean
Sean: not exactly apochrypha. Many different versions of the Gospels were circulating at the time, both written and oral -- the Bible wasn't formalized in the sequence we're familiar with until fairly late. Even the Old Testament wasn't compiled until the 10th century CE, for instance, and the oldest Latin Vulgate is 8th century.
The Ethiopian Bible, representative of Middle Eastern Christianity in its pre-Islamic form, has 81 books, many of which are regarded as apochryha by Western Christians and some by the Orthodox too.
In Mohammed's time, the eastern churches didn't have a fixed set of generally-agreed on texts, and multiple versions were circulating and were common in Aramaic manuscript form and used for preaching and teaching in the non-Greek parts of the Near East, and some of them reached as far east as China.
Those demotic seem to be the ones on which early Muslims drew.
For the first century or two, Greek Orthodox sources usually refer to Islam as a Christian heresy, with some justification.
Texual criticism revealed the many layers of authorship in the Bible in the 19th century; the same techniques are now being applied to the Koran.
Paul: you can't study a religious text properly from within its own tradition because then you can't come to it 'de novo'.
Dante has Muhammad as a Christian heretic.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
I appreciate your always interesting comments, even when I don't always agree with them.
Apologies if I speak as a Catholic, but it was precisely those variant "gospels" which the Church rejected as heretical or apocryphal. Some because they were gnostic texts teaching ideas no Christian can agree with. Also, as early (or late, if you like) as the Council of Rome under Pope Damasus in AD 382, a list of the books, OT and NT, the Church accepted as canonical was drawn up. And that list was precisely the same as the canon defined de fide by the Council of Trent in 1546.
And textual criticism or analysis of the Bible is not a new art or science, only recently invented in the past two or three centuries. The basic methods, and conclusions to be made from using them, goes as far back as Origen in the early third century AD. And we see St. Augustine making his own contributions to that science in his Scriptural commentaries. Points which David L. Dungan discussed in massive detail in his book A HISTORY OF THE SYNOPTIC QUESTION.
I used to believe in Markan Priority and the Q theory before I read Dungan's book. The arguments and evidence presented in that book convinced me Markan Priority/Q was false. And the arguments Dungan drew from the Fathers in favor of Matthean priority and an early dating for the Gospels were also supported by the work of William Farmer in studies like THE GOSPEL OF JESUS.
So, yes, I agree there were "gospels" circulating in Arabia in Mohammed's early years. But I argue they included apocryphal/heretical texts as well as canonical works.
I think what became the Greek Orthodox Church waited till the Trullan Synod of about AD 690 before drawing up an authoritative listing of Scriptures accepted as canonical. I would have to check to see how close that list was to the Western canon. It's possible the Trullan Synod met partly to settle, once and for all, the status of those extracanonical texts which had been circulating in Syria/Arabia.
I'm not surprised some eastern Christians thought of Islam as merely another quasi Christian heresy! I first came across that idea in Hilaire Belloc's works, who thought of Islam as a stripped down, Arianizing imitation of Christianity. And some Muslim ideas, such as denial of the Trinity and the divinity of Christ, reminds me of the tenets of the Unitarians and Jehovah's Witnesses.
I have heard of how the Ethiopian canon of the Bible differs from the Catholic and Orthodox, including books the others reject as apocryphal. It would be interesting to know what Ethiopian Orthodox now think of their canon.
Ad astra and Merry Christmas! Sean
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