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(ProQuest: ... Greek characters omitted or Cyrillic characters omitted.)
According to the fully articulated salvation history of Islam, Moses and Jesus (like all prophets) were Muslims. Moses received an Islamic scripture, the Torah (tawrat), as did Jesus, the Gospel (injil). Their communities, however, suppressed their religion and altered their scriptures. Accordingly, a canonical hadlth has the Prophet Muhammad declare:
O community of Muslims, how is it that you seek wisdom from the People of the Book? Your book, brought down upon His Prophet - blessings and peace of God upon him - is the latest report about God. You read a Book that has not been distorted, but the People of the Book, as God related to you, exchanged that which God wrote [for something else], changing the book with their hands.1
This hadlth reflects the idea found frequently among Muslim scholars, usually described with the term tahrif that the Bible has been literally altered. The same idea lies behind Yaqut's (d. 626/1229) attribution of a quotation on Jerusalem to a Jewish convert to Islam from Banu Qurayza "who possessed a copy of the uncorrupted Torah."2
Muslim scholars also accuse Jews and Christians of misinterpreting the Bible by hiding, ignoring, or misreading it, and on occasion they describe such misinterpretation as tahrif as well. Accordingly, in scholarly treatments of the subject a comparison is sometimes made between tahrif al-nass, alteration of the text of scripture, and tahrif al-mac ani, misinterpretation of scripture. Yet Muslim scholars who accuse Jews and Christians of misinterpretation do not mean to imply thereby that the Bible has not been altered. Instead they employ the idea of tahrif al-mai ani for the sake of argument.3 In al-Radd al-jamil li-ilahiyyat cIsa bi-sarih al-injil ("The Splendid Refutation to the Divinity of Jesus through a Clear Reading of the Gospel"), a work attributed to al-Ghazali (d. 505/1111), the author quotes liberally from the Christian Gospels to argue against Christian doctrine on Jesus.4 However, if the author finds his religious thought confirmed in the Bible, he never turns to the Bible as a source for new or improved religious thought. He does not, for example, accept the New Testament accounts of the crucifixion.
In the present paper I will say something about the question of...