One of the major features of
the age-old polemical interaction between major Abrahamic peoples and
religions of the Book has been the question of the sacredness, veracity
and inspired or revealed nature of specific scriptures in the form of a
sacred Book or collection of books. Jews accused their Samaritan
("Israelite-Judaic") neighbors and various Christian groups of tampering
with sacred writ and both these and other groups reciprocated similarly.
Following a few qur'anic verses primarily directed towards Jews (Q.
2:75b; 4:46a; 5:13a; 5:41b) it was from very early on in the evolution
of Islam (2nd-3rd cent AH), that Muslim writers condemned both Jews and
Christians for indulging in the (Ar.) tahríf ("scriptural
falsification") and tabdíll ("textual alternation") of the Bible. Many
Muslims came to regard the Bible as largely or wholly "corrupted" and
repeated versions of a tradition interdicting qur'anic-Islamic
exposition through biblically related traditions of the bani Isra'il
("children of Israel") known as Isra'iliyyat ("Israelitica").
Though early Tafsir-Qur'an commentary made massive of the Bible or Islamo-biblical
data/ Isra'iliyyat, the
anti-biblical / Isra'iliyyat position was trenchantly and most famously
voiced, for example, by the prolific Andalusian theologian, jurist and
ultimately Zahiri ("literalist"-"fundamentalist") Sunni writer Ibn Hazm
(d. 456/1064) as well as by many others. While a considerable number of post
3rd cent AH /10th century CE Muslim thinkers in both the Sunni and Shi`i
worlds regarded the Bible as "corrupted" a few considered the
Bible as fundamentally authentic and quite frequently cited it. Important in
this respect are statements of the great medievaL comparative religions
expert and Qur'an exegete al-Shahrastani (ADD). His position was very close
to that argued by Baha'-Allah in the Iraq (Baghdad) period Arabic
Jawahir al-asrar (c. 1860-1) and Persian Kitab-i iqan (c. 1862-3).
Important writings of Baha'-Allah of the Edirne (Adrianople; 1863-1868) and
Acre (`Akka') or West Galilean periods (1868-1892) cite the Bible. This
often in European Christian translations such as that found in (missionary)
revisions of the 17th century Arabic versions printed in the Paris and
London Polyglot Bibles and the early 19th century Protestant Persian version
of Henry Martyn (d. Tokat 1812).
Bahá'u'lláh's eldest son `Abdu'l-Bahá elaborated his father's perspectives
regarding the Bible and the Qur'an denying concrete tahríf of both these
sacred books while condemning scriptural literalism and restrictive,
non-spiritual fundamentalism. Bahá'u'lláh's great-grandson Shoghi Effendi
(d. 1957) clarified further the Bahái attitude towards Abrahamic and other
sacred books exhorting Bahá'ís to study and expound both the Bible and the
Qur'an in the light of Bahá'í perspectives. In this paper aspects of the
history of tahríf and related concepts in biblical and Islamic history will
be surveyed along with the Bábí-Bahá'í attitude towards them. It will be
seen that the Bahá'í attitude towards the Bible and Qur'an is accepting and
unitative of Jewish-Christian and Islamic perspectives. Both Bible and
Qur'an are seen to complement each other and contain valid levels of
inspiration and guidance. Sayyid `Ali Muhammad Shirazi, the Bab
