Qur’anic Interpretation in Light of Progressive Revelation

“It was concerning him and Abdullah ibn Ubayy that this passage from the Sura of the Table came down: ‘O you who believe, take not Jews and Christians as friends.
They are friends one of another. Who of you takes them as friends is one
of them. God will not guide the unjust people. You can see those in
whose heart there is sickness’…

Life and Work of the Prophet, p. 79

This is one of several passages in the assigned primary text that are representative of the manner in which the progressive revelation of the Qur’an was accomplished. It came as a surprise to me that there were specific Suras that came about as God’s response to the events that were occurring in the life of Muhammad. I am sure that I would not be alone in saying that I assumed the revelation of Qur’an would be independent of temporal matters.

The fact that there is such an intimate connection between the life and works of Muhammad and the progressive revelation of the Qur’an has several interesting effects on the Islamic theology of who God is and how he deals with humans (which I am hoping we will study in the near future!) and on how the Qur’an itself is to be interpreted. If Muslims believe that the Qur’an was dictated by God before Muhammad ever existed and then given to him in pieces, that means that God had already known what events Muhammad was going to experience and had spoken regarding those things prior to Muhammad’s experience of those events. This implies that God is all-knowing and all-powerful, and knows what things will happen before they take place. There are then two possible implications on Qur’anic interpretation.

The first possibility is that God had certain principles in mind regarding the way of life for Muslims (such as “Take not Jews and Christians as friends”) which existed prior to the life and works of Muhammad. And so God, desiring to give these principles to the people in a way that would ‘stick’, revealed them to Muhammad in response to certain experiences that he had. That way, the teachings of God in the Qur’an would be better remembered and they would be associated with an event in history that demonstrates the truth of the teaching. The alternative, however, is that God wanted to impart certain principles to the people in response to what he knew was going to happen in the life of Muhammad and his companions. In this way, God’s knowledge of the life and works of Muhammad existed prior to his spoken word in the Qur’an, and what was dictated in the Qur’an is actually a direct response to the events that were to take place.

The former possibility certainly appears to have a higher theology than the latter and would likely considered to be the more orthodox belief (though I genuinely do not know if this is the case, or if this is a matter of dispute). Nevertheless, it appears that the latter possibility would have a better chance of offering a coherent account of the apparent contradictions or ambiguous passages, and would serve as a contextualization and clarification tool for points of dispute. It would also serve to create a method of interpretation in the Qur’an that was dependent on the chronology of the revelations, with the most recent revelation on a disputed point being the one that should be followed. (Here, I am thinking of the various passages and Suras that address how Muslims should deal with Jews.)

The reading certainly seemed to indicate that certain Suras were dictated as a direct result of the events in the life of Muhammad and his companions, but if it is theologically necessary for God to retain a sense of distance and independence in Islamic belief, then either the author’s narrative style would be condemnable, or there would need to be some other way of accounting for the ambiguous passages that was independent of chronology or narrative.