Taḥrīf
(“scriptural falsification”) and Tanzil (“divine revelation”):
Some aspects of divine guidance through sacred Scripture
Stephen Lambden
Abstract:
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.
In an increasing number of his ultimately 20,000 or more alwah (scriptural Tablets) of
the Edirne (Adrianople; 1863-1868) and Acre (`Akka') or West Galilean
periods (1868-1892), Bahá'u'lláh cited the Bible as an authentic
scripture. Such is clear from the time of his Arabic Jawahir al-asrar
(Essence of Mysteries) dating around 1860-1 and his Persian Kitab-i iqan
(Book of Certitude) 1862-3, as well as hundreds of subsequent
scriptural writings addressed to Jews, Christians, Muslims and others.
Bahá'u'lláh's eldest son `Abdu'l-Bahá
(1844-1921) 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. Subsequently 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 Islamic and pre-Islamic sacred writ. 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.
