An enduring allegation against Islam is that the Qur’an “copies” other scriptures. The main case presented is nearly always the Talmud – the most important religious text of the Jews, alongside the Hebrew Bible.

This idea of the Qur’an taking inspiration from the Talmud originates from Abraham Geiger, a rabbi from Germany. He is one of the spiritual fathers of liberal Judaism. At the beginning of the 19th century, he also penned works about the “Jewish influence upon Islam.”

Other Orientalists followed suit in this regard, often Christian missionaries.

We will be taking a closer look at this claim, using their own standards.

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The Oldest Talmudic Written Evidences are Post-Qur’anic

Orientalists and critics of Islam utilize the so-called “historical-critical method.” That is, they look for the oldest Qur’anic manuscripts and dive into textual criticism, manuscript evidences, etc., as a way to somehow dismiss it as merely being derivative.

As part of this process, they look for datable “material proofs.”

However, they dismiss the sciences of ḥadīth transmission, and Islam’s entire oral tradition.

So, when it comes to Talmudic “influences” on the Qur’an, why not take a look at what we have as well?

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Richard Freund, a university professor who specializes in Biblical archaeology, laments in his Digging Through the Bible, p. 173:

Although internal evidence shows that the Babylonian Talmudic text was completed in the sixth century CE, the earliest complete copy of the Babylonian Talmud extant today is only from a fourteen-century manuscript (Munich, Codex 95). We do have some manuscript fragments of the Babylonian Talmud from the eight to ninth century CE, but they are just fragments.

Likewise we read on the Center for Online Judaic Studies that:

The earliest manuscripts of Rabbinic literature date to the middle ages, hundreds of years after many of the cardinal documents of the “Oral Torah” were initially promulgated.

Basically, the oldest Talmudic fragments – we’re not even talking about complete manuscripts – date back to centuries after the death of the Prophet ﷺ.

For those interested, Shaykh Muṣṭafā al-A’ẓamī – the late India-born ḥadīth specialist from Saudi – contrasted the textual history of the Qur’an with those of the Jewish and Christian scriptures in his History of the Quranic Text, from Revelation to Compilation.

Why then, don’t Orientalists apply the same reasoning to the opposite scenario? The Qur’an has written evidence dating back to within the life of the Prophet ﷺ (see the Birmingham manuscript among others). This is far earlier than the oldest Talmudic fragments. So why do they not posit the “hypothesis” that it is in fact the Talmud which sought “inspiration” from the Qur’an, and not the reverse?

In fact, some scholars actually do believe this to be the case.

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When the Talmud Copies the Qur’an

In a 1974 article for The Journal of Semitic Studies (volume 9, issue 2) titled “The Story of Cain and Abel in the Qur’an and the Muslim Commentators,” Norman Stillman (an American Orientalist with Jewish origins) admits in the introduction:

A great deal has been written about the Judaeo-Christian elements in Islam and its scripture ever since Abraham Geiger’s Was bat Mohammed aus dem Judenthume aufgenommen? first appeared in 1833. Geiger’s book made a profound impression in its day, although it did tend to give an exaggerated view of the Jewish contribution in the Qur’an. Many of the traditions that he cites are in oriental Christian as well as talmudic and haggadic literature. Our chronology of rabbinic literature is better today than in Geiger’s, and many more texts – Muslim, Jewish, and Christian – have since been published. In the light of this we now know that in some instances what was thought to be Jewish haggadic influence in an Islamic text might well be quite the reverse. The Pirqe de Rabbi Elie’zer, for example, would seem to have been finally redacted after the advent of Islam.

More than thirty years later, Michael E. Pregill (another Orientalist), iterates the very same thing in his article “The Hebrew Bible and the Quran: The Problem of the Jewish ‘Influence’ on Islam,” published in the Religion Compass journal (volume 1, issue 6), p. 655:

The traditional paradigm is simply that in some cases, allegations of the Quran’s (or the Prophet’s) borrowing from Jews are simply unwarranted. Careful analysis of particular narratives may show that, in contrast to the assertions of previous generations of scholars, the Quran simply does not consistently reflect the direct derivation of biblical data from Jews or a straightforward assimilation of rabbinic midrash. Rather, the opposite may be the case, namely, that Jews quite likely ‘borrowed’ from the Quran, or even from later Islamic literature.

From the many so-called “Qur’anic borrowings from rabbinical literature” which have been debunked by modern scholarship, we will suffice with the case of “the repentance of Fir’awn.”

Many earlier Orientalists have argued that the drowning and debated repentance which we find in the Qur’an, has its roots in Talmudic stories.

Yet, Nicolai Sinai writes in “Pharaoh’s Submission to God in the Qur’an and in Rabbinic Literature: A Case Study in Qur’anic Intertextuality”, included in: The Qur’an’s Reformation of Judaism and Christianity: Return to the Origins, edited by Holger Zellentin, pp. 240-241:

There is an additional problem with PRE’s portrayal of Pharaoh’s repentance that is not addressed by Paret but would seem to support his marked lack of interest in Geiger’s discovery. As recognized already by Leopold Zunz, the final editing of PRE cannot have taken place before the eighth century. This is supported above all by various allusions to Islam. It has furthermore been argued that the astronomical chapters, PRE 6–8, when measured against what we know about the history of medieval astronomy, are unlikely to predate the ninth century. Such a late dating evidently undermines the claim that PRE’s account of Pharaoh’s survival is to be regarded as the immediate source of Q 10:90–92, and the possibility that the latter may instead be the source of the former accordingly needs to be taken very seriously.

Being an Orientalist,  of course he’s going to be precautious. It may even be considered anti-Semitic by some to suggest that the Talmud copies the Qur’an! Yet, this same level of precaution is not taken by Orientalists when it comes to the Qur’an.

However, this could become a good practice:

Whenever the Qur’an is accused of “copying” a Talmudic story, we could examine the different evidences – both external (such as manuscript dating) and internal (such as language or scientific knowledge) – and we’ll come to the provable conclusion that the Qur’an is more likely the source rather than the “copy-cat.”

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For material against such “borrowing” theory attacks against Islam, you may refer to this page by Islamic Awareness.

Bernard Lewis Admits It!

Bernard Lewis was a famous British-American Orientalist of Jewish origins who passed away in 2018. He is considered the most influential Orientalist of his time.

He was a neocon whose words had a direct impact on the geopolitics of the day, such as the Iraq War. This is to the extent that when he died, British conservative journalist Peter Oborne called him “the high priest of war in the Middle East.”

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