Daniel A.

Beck
[email protected]

MUḤAMMAD’S NIGHT JOURNEY IN ITS PALESTINIAN CONTEXT – A

PERFECT SOLUTION TO A FORGOTTEN PROBLEM (Q 17:1)
The author was here drawing the boundaries of the sacred space of Jerusalem, while at the same
time proclaiming possession of this territory of grace—that this network of holy places belonged
to his hero too, and not only to the Chalcedonians currently in possession of them. Although
Peter could not undertake this sacred journey, or was prevented from doing so, he did not
renounce the holy places. This visionary journey was in fact a provisional solution, a perfect
device used in troubled times in the city for tackling the tension between access to and
debarment from the holy places in Jerusalem.1

1. Introduction and Summary

Muḥammad’s night journey, related by the opening verse of Surat al-Isrā’ (Q 17:1), is a
fantastic episode in the prophet’s biography. Scholars have usually analyzed this journey as a
heavenly vision that helped legitimate the Arabian prophet, similar to various prophetic visions
from Jewish and Christian tradition. Yet this specific Qur’anic text has rarely been subjected to
modern analytical methods, and its Palestinian context has been unduly minimized.
Starting with Gustav Weil, scholars have observed that Q 17:1 was interpolated, since
inter alia every verse in Surat al-Isrā’ shares the same end rhyme – except Q 17:1. Moses was
evidently the subject of the pre-interpolation Q 17:1, with variants of its rare verb ’asrā used by
three other surahs to designate Moses’ nocturnal exodus from Egypt (Q 20:77, 26:52, 44:23).
But the interpolation of Q 17:1 substituted an anonymous servant of God (meant to be
understood as Muḥammad) for Moses, and described that servant’s journey from the sacred
masjid to the furthest masjid, usually understood as Jerusalem. Why was it so important to
establish that Muḥammad made this nocturnal journey, to the point of requiring interpolation?
This article argues that the interpolation of Q 17:1 sought to fix a severe problem with
Qur’anic typology as Islam emerged, with the problem’s context being Palestinian (hence its
focus on the masjid al-aqṣā) rather than Hijazi. The Qur’ān likened the mu’minūn (believers) to
Abraham’s children, and likened its Arabian messenger to Moses. This helped legitimize the
mu’minūn’s claims to political and religious authority.
But this typology also left the mu’minūn vulnerable to incendiary forms of Christian
polemic incorporated in their own Qur’anic texts, particularly Surat al-Isrā’. Q 17:4-8 revels in
the Roman destruction of the Jewish Temple, along with the Roman expulsion of the ‘corrupt’
Jews from Jerusalem. Q 17:4 contends that the Book of Moses decreed this fate for the Jews,
and identifies the Romans as God’s new servants. This Qur’anic exaltation of Roman-Christian
supremacy over Jerusalem contradicted emerging claims for the supremacy of Muḥammad and
his followers. Jesus had entered Jerusalem as a perfectly obedient prophet, and God had given
the city over to his followers. In contrast, both Muḥammad and Moses had failed to reach

1
B. Bitton-Ashkelony, Encountering the Sacred: The Debate on Christian Pilgrimage in Late Antiquity
(Berkeley 2005): 187 (discussing the visionary pilgrimage to Jerusalem made by Peter the Iberian, the anti-
Chalcedonian monk and Bishop of Gaza).

1
Jerusalem. Further, as Stephen Shoemaker has argued, early mu’minūn evidently viewed
Muḥammad’s death as an unexpected calamity. He had planned to enter Jerusalem in
eschatological triumph, but failed.2 How could Muḥammad be God’s final prophet when he had
died in exile from the Holy Land, just like the disobedient Moses? God had instead made
Jerusalem the Holy City of Jesus, Romans, and Christians, as Q 17:1-8 confirmed.
To fix this vulnerability, Q 17:1 was interpolated to claim that Muḥammad had made a
miraculous journey to Jerusalem. The interpolator adapted a distinctive anti-Chalcedonian
pilgrimage tradition: When a holy man could not enter Jerusalem because the city was
controlled by heretics, he could instead make a spiritual pilgrimage. As interpolated, Q 17:1
clarified that Muḥammad had not, like Moses, failed to reach Jerusalem. Instead God took him
to the city, where he saw its holy signs and encountered the divine presence they embodied (a
topos of Christian pilgrimage). Q 17:1 does not describe signs witnessed in heaven. Rather the
text describes the servant of God as being shown the signs in Jerusalem itself, embedded in the
city’s sacred geography, as revealed by God to the successor Qur’anic prophet.
Like Jesus, Muḥammad had fulfilled his destiny within the Holy City. His nocturnal
pilgrimage allowed him to evade the corrupt Christian mushrikūn who controlled Jerusalem,
while still claiming the Holy City’s sacred space, just as Peter the Iberian, the hero of Palestinian
anti-Chalcedonians (and a central historical personality behind conversion of Arabia Petraea to
Christianity), had famously made his own late 5th century nocturnal pilgrimage to Jerusalem,
communing with God’s signs in the city while flouting Chalcedonian power. Peter’s journey
was part of the broader anti-Chalcedonian reinvention of Palestinian pilgrimage traditions in the
fifth-sixth centuries, which re-conceptualized Palestinian pilgrimage as a spiritualized and
abstracted practice that could be claimed by ‘pure believers’ isolated in peripheral regions.
This ingenious Qur’anic argument was obscured when Islamic tradition almost entirely
suppressed the early mu’minūn’s focus on Jerusalem, replacing it with a Meccan focus and a
competing Hijazi pilgrimage. Muḥammad was now portrayed as a perfect Hijazi prophet, only
vaguely connected to Jerusalem, and the specific argument for his prophetic status that Q 17:1
had forcefully advanced was replaced in Qur’anic exegesis with mystical speculation.
The analysis concludes by examining several other classic ‘pilgrimage problems’ in the
Qur’ān, suggesting that anti-Chalcedonian tradition can help explain these riddles.

2. Text and Translation of Q 17:1

The transliterated Arabic text of Q 17:1 is as follows:

subḥāna lladhī ʾasrā bi-ʿabdihī laylan mina l-masjidi l-ḥarāmi ʾilā al-masjidi l-ʾaqṣā lladhī
bāraknā ḥawlahū li-nuriyahū min ʾāyātinā ʾinnahū huwa s-samīʿu l-baṣīru

A. J. Droge’s translation:

“Glory be to the One who sent His servant on a journey by night from the Sacred Mosque to the
Distant Mosque, whose surroundings We have blessed, so that We might show him some of Our
signs. Surely He – He is the Hearing, the Seeing.”3

2
S. Shoemaker, The Death of a Prophet (Philadelphia 2012).
3
A. J. Droge, The Qur’ān: A New Annotated Translation (Bristol 2013).

2
3. Traditional Interpretation of Q 17:1 and its Problems

Modern scholars usually treat this verse as isolated, with no direct relationship to the following
verses, but this attitude seems to be wrong.4

Most readers will recall the traditional Islamic exegesis of Q 17:1. The verse is said to relate
Muḥammad’s miraculous night journey (isrā’) from Mecca to Jerusalem, with the prophet
traveling upon the magical steed Buraq. From Jerusalem, Muḥammad ascended (the mi‘rāj) to
the heavens, where he witnessed many incredible signs and marvels.
These stories appear late, legendary, and extrinsic to the text. It is unclear why
Muḥammad would need to be taken to Jerusalem to ascend into heaven. The Qur’anic text does
not mention an ascent. The traditional reading also disconnects Q 17:1 from its following verses.
Yet modern scholars have generally followed Nöldeke in treating the verse as relating a
heavenly vision or dream experienced by Muḥammad, similar to the magical journey described
by Islamic tradition, and akin to the visions of various Biblical figures. This approach isolates Q
17:1 from its following verses and from its late antique context. Such isolation prevents the
analysis from adequately engaging several critical points: (1) the verse was interpolated; (2) it
focuses on a nocturnal journey to see the holy places in Jerusalem; and (3) it relates intimately to
its following verses.
The analysis below attempts to apply a more modern and contextual approach, focused
upon the text itself, its surrounding verses, parallel Qur’anic language, and late antique
Palestinian traditions regarding miraculous spiritual journeys to Jerusalem.

4. The Interpolation of Q 17:1 and a Reconstruction of its Ur-Text

Redaction criticism can be applied to the Qur’ān.5

The observation that Q 17:1 was interpolated is not new. More than a century ago, Gustav Weil
concluded that the verse must have been inserted after Muḥammad’s death6; Sprenger likewise
considered it a forgery. In response, Nöldeke and Schwally asserted its authenticity, claiming
that Muḥammad must have composed the verse to relate a vivid dream that the prophet mistook
for reality7 – although they conceded that Muḥammad could not have placed the verse in its
present location in Surat al-Isrā’, given its broken rhyme scheme, surmising that the verse’s

4
U. Rubin, “Muhammad’s Night Journey (Isrā’) to al-Masjid al-Aqṣā. Aspects of the Earliest Origins of the
Islamic Sanctity of Jerusalem,” Al-Qantara XXIX 1, pp. 147-164 (2008): 154.
5
G. Dye, “The Qur’ān and its Hypertextuality in Light of Redaction Criticism,” Paper for the Fourth
Nangeroni Meeting (Early Islamic Studies Seminar, Milan, 15-19 June 2015): 2 n. 9.
6
G. Weil, Historisch-kritische Einleitung in den Koran, 1st ed. (Bielefeld 1844): 65-66. See also G. Weil,
Historisch-kritische Einleitung in den Koran, 2nd ed. (Bielefeld 1872): 74-76.
7
According to Nöldeke this is ohne Zweifel, beyond doubt. Nöldeke-Schwally, Geschichte des Qorāns I
(Leipzig 1909): 102. Against this Nöldekian certainty one should contrast Gabriel Said Reynolds’ observation that
“Nöldeke’s approach to the text appears simplistic today. He never considers seriously the possibility that the
Qur’ān might include different sources, or that later redactors might have had a role in modifying an earlier text. He
takes for granted the traditional notion that the Qur’ān can be split up according to episodes in the life of one man
and assumes that the Qur’ān is a perfect transcript (albeit out of order) of what Muḥammad – and only Muḥammad –
really said.” G.S. Reynolds, “The History of the Qur’ān,” Ilahiyat Studies Vol. 5 No. 2, pp. 2-57 (Summer/Fall
2014): 254.

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original ending must have been lost.8 As his concluding point, Schwally argued that there was
no plausible reason for interpolating the verse: “Vor allem wäre aber das Motiv der Interpolation
aufzudecken, was noch niemanden gelungen ist.”9 Answering that challenge, this article
attempts to explain the Motiv der Interpolation.
The interpolation itself is readily shown by the text and its parallel Qur’ānic language.10
Q 17:1 ends with the word basīru, recited as basīr in pausal form, with the ending sound īr.
Every other verse in the surah, which has 111 verses total, ends with an, generally recited as a,
so that the surah otherwise has a very constant and monotonous end rhyme. Q 17:1 does not
rhyme, but every other verse in this long surah does. Such a striking disruption of a strict
Qur’ānic rhyme scheme is often a good indication of interpolation.
Q 17:1 has a somewhat different theme than its following verses.11 It recounts a
marvelous journey by God’s ‘servant,’ usually taken to be Muḥammad, who God took from one
masjid (literally place of prostration) to a second masjid located within blessed precincts, where
the servant was shown God’s signs (āyāt). Q 17:2 then begins “And we gave Musa [Moses] the
Book, and made it a guidance for the Children of Israel,” followed by Q 17:3 which states “The
seed of those We bore with Noah; he was a thankful servant.” After the miraculous night
journey of a contemporary Arabian prophet, the next two verses invoke two ancient Biblical
prophets, followed by several verses (Q 17:4-9) that condemn the Jews for their disobedience.
Q 17:1 portrays the servant of God as making a magical journey over an immense
distance. This clashes with the Qur’ān’s refrain that Muḥammad did not work miracles.12
Q 17:1 has a peculiar shift of narrative perspective. It begins by proclaiming “Glory be
to the One who sent His servant,” but then describes that servant as being taken to a place
“whose surroundings We have blessed, so that We might show him some of Our signs” before
concluding “Surely He – He is the Hearing, the Seeing.” The verse thus shifts rapidly between
“He” speech and “We” speech, with the deity being praised by a third party, but then suddenly
speaking as himself in plural, and then finally shifting back to being praised by the third party.
The verse praises God in third-person singular, while narrating his actions in the first-person
plural. The Qur’ān frequently employs confusing shifts of narrative perspective,13 but Q 17:1 is
extreme. It looks as though an older verse, composed in glorifying “He” speech, was partly

8
Per Schwally, “Die Beobachtung Weils, daß der Vers im folgenden keinen Auschluß habe, ist richtig, aber
für die Echtheitsfrage belanglos, trifft dies ja doch noch für viele andere Qorānverse zu, die bisher nicht beanstandet
worden sind. Der Sachverhalt läßt sich damit erklären, daß der Vers seine ursprüngliche Fortsetzung verloren hat.
Und wegen des abweichenden Reimes auf īr, während die übrigen 110 Verse der Sure ausnahmlos auf a endigen, ist
wahrscheinlich, daß der ganze Abschnitt ehemals ene ganz andere Stelle hätte.” GdQ II, pp. 86-7.
9
Ibid., p. 89.
10
Ibid., p. 87.
11
According to Nöldeke, “V. 1 hängt mit dem folgenden nicht zusammen; vielleicht ward er absichtlich
hierher gesetzt, weil in dieser Sura auch sonst von jenem Traum die Rede ist. Dagegen muss vor v. 2 Etwas
ausgefallen sein, da dieser Vers sonst ganz zusammenhanglos wär.” GdQ I, p. 103. Nöldeke’s suggestion that the
verse has lost its original conclusion follows his contention that the verse must relate a dream that Q 17:61 and Q
17:96 also describe (and which Muḥammad supposedly mistook for reality, an error that Nöldeke claims is common
in primitive society). Against Nöldeke’s suppositions, it is argued here that nothing was accidentally ausgefallen.
12
Weil treats the journey’s miraculous nature as proof that the verse is inauthentic, but that inference seems
unnecessary. The verse’s broken rhyme scheme, and its shifts of narrative perspective, are stronger evidence.
13
See, e.g., G. Dye, “La nuit du Destin et la nuit de la Nativité,” Figures Bibliques en Islam (Brussels 2012):
155 (noting that Q 16:1 and Q 17:1 use third-person singular narrative, i.e. ‘he speech,’ and that the Qur’ān displays
a complex alternation of narrative perspectives, often with grammatical conflict and ambiguity).

4
overwritten with divine action (God sending his servant on the night journey) that is directly
narrated in “We” speech, the divine narrative perspective so characteristic of the Qur’ān.
Examining parallel Qur’anic language helps clarify how Q 17:1 was likely altered. Its
rare verb ’asrā is only used five other times in the Qur’ān.14 All five other Qur’anic uses of the
verb are in the imperative form ’asri (unlike the ’asrā of Q 17:1, with its final alif maqṣūrah),
and designate miraculous nocturnal escapes made by Biblical prophets. Three of these ’asri
episodes (Q 20:77, 26:52, 44:23) describe the nocturnal exodus made by Moses and the Israelites
from Egypt; like Q 17:1, each such ‘Moses’ ’asri also contains a variation of the word ‘servant,’
ibād.15 The other two Qur’anic uses of ’asri refer to the nocturnal escape of Lot (Lūṭ) from his
city (Q 11:81, 15:65). For all five Qur’anic uses of ’asri, the nocturnal escapes are accompanied
by divine destruction of the wicked oppressors. They are all retribution pericopes. For Moses,
the Red Sea drowns Pharaoh’s forces. For Lot, angels destroy his sinful city. These five ’asri
episodes are each followed by rhetoric which implores obedience to God.
With this comparative Qur’anic background, the original form of Q 17:1 can be
ascertained in rough contour. First, its text would certainly have ended with an, just like every
other verse in the sūrah. Second, it was probably closer in length to its following verses. Third,
it related to Moses, who is described as the servant of God, and it led naturally into Q 17:2,
which recounts Moses receiving the scripture on Mount Sinai. Fourth, it related a nocturnal
escape, which was followed by divine punishment of the disobedient oppressors. Fifth, its main
theme paralleled the theme of its immediately-following verses, Q 17:2-8, as well as other
Qur’anic verses with parallel language.
The opening clause of Q 17:1—sub’ḥāna alladhī ’asrā biʿabdihi laylan—already meets
these criteria. It has the same end rhyme as the rest of the sūrah, ending with the accusative
indefinite noun laylan. It is shorter. It means “Glory be to the One who sent His servant on a
journey by night,” which matches the other three Qur’anic accounts of Moses, which all use ’asri
alongside ibād. The ur-text of Q 17:1 would thus have reminded its audience about Moses’
nocturnal exodus from Egypt (just like the ’asri of Q 20:77, 26:52, and 44:23), after which
Moses received the Book on mount Sinai, precisely as Q 17:2 recounts. This was evidently the
‘night journey’ of the ur-text, a formulaic reminder about Moses leading his people’s escape
from Egypt, with the wicked Pharaoh’s forces being destroyed in the Red Sea16 (cf. Q 17:101-
104, relating this same story),17 followed by Moses receiving the Torah on Sinai (Q 17:2).18
Because the verse’s parallels to the Qur’anic Moses narratives are so strong, A.J. Droge
annotates his recent translation of Q 17:1 by noting that the reference to the “servant of God”

14
Q 17:1 uses ’asrā to specify that God ‘sent’ or ‘took’ his servant on the journey. All five other Qur’anic
uses of the verb are in the imperative ’asri form (Q 11:81, 15:65, 20:77, 26:52, 44:23), with Moses and Lot being
ordered to make their night journeys; evidently the Q 17:1 servant could not make his magical journey unaided.
15
In Q 20:77, the phrase is ’asri bi‘ibādī. In Q 26:52, the phrase is ’asri biʿibādī. In Q 44:23, the phrase is
fa-’asri bi‘ibādī laylan. By contrast, the two uses of ’asri in the context of the prophet Lot do not mention ibād. In
Q 11:81, the phrase is fa-’asri bi-ʾahlika bi-qiṭʿin mina l-layli, the same phrase that Q 15:65 uses.
16
The same salvation narrative is related in Q 8:41, where God’s servant (‘abdinā) in the original textual unit
was Moses, with God saving the Israelites and giving (anzalnā) Moses the Book. Islamic tradition’s ‘Battle of
Badr’ was later interposed over this text, resemanticizing its Syriacism (fur’qān). F. Donner, “Quranic Furqān,”
Journal of Semitic Studies no. 52, 2 (2007): 288-289.
17
Q 17:101-104, relating the ‘clear signs’ (āyāt bayyinātin) that Moses showed to Pharaoh, followed by the
Egyptians’ destruction and the Israelites’ inheritance of the Holy Land, probably parallels the ur-text of Q 17:1.
18
While it is impossible to be certain about the ur-verse’s original form, which may well have included other
language (and been followed by one or more other short verses), its likely broad contours can be ascertained.

5
may simply designate Moses outright, not Muḥammad.19 Yet this is difficult to accept when we
consider the last portion of Q 17:1, which diverges from orthodox Christian and Jewish
narratives about Moses. In contrast to the postulated ur-text of Q 17:1 described above, the
verse’s concluding text that describes the night journey as being from l-masjidi l-ḥarāmi ilā l-
masjidi l-aqṣā has no Qur’anic parallel, nor does it plausibly refer to Moses.20 This geographical
description was added to the verse,21 probably following its otherwise rhyming end word laylan
(night). A narrative relating Moses’ nocturnal exodus from Egypt was revised to relate a
different ‘night journey’ made by a different servant, implicitly the Qur’anic messenger, who had
miraculously travelled between his local masjid and a distant masjid located in Jerusalem.
Q 17:1 has often been interpreted as focused upon a heavenly Jerusalem, rather than the
actual terrestrial city. As Uri Rubin has observed, however, that is an artifact of the verse’s
Christian subtext, which depicts the city in sanctified form. “[T]he Qur’ānic al-Masjid al-Aqṣā
seems to reflect an Islamized version of the earthly—yet divinely purified—Jerusalem as
envisioned in Christian texts of late-antiquity.”22 The interpolated language distinguished the
messenger’s night journey from the night journey of Moses by emphasizing the unique
geographical destination of the Arabian prophet, conceptualized via this prevailing Christian
imagery of the terrestrial Jerusalem. “[N]othing in the Qur’ānic isrā’ verse seems decisively
heavenly and much of it seems rather to lead to the conclusion that the verse deals with a night
journey to a terrestrial masjid situated in the holy land.”23
But why was it so crucial to differentiate Muḥammad from Moses, and why was this
differentiation articulated as a nocturnal journey between two masjids, ending in Jerusalem?
What was the point of interjecting Muḥammad into the Qur’anic narrative here, and why was his
night journey to Jerusalem written over text that had originally related Moses’ exodus from
Egypt? What urgent problem did this interpolation help solve (i.e. what was its Motiv)? We
must analyze the immediately following verses before returning to answer these questions.

19
Droge annotates Q 17:1 by explaining that the verse “is traditionally identified with the Prophet, but it may
refer to Moses, who is mentioned in the verse immediately following; cf. the similar descriptions of Moses’
departure from Egypt (Q20.77; 26.52; 44.23); and Lot’s departure from Sodom (Q11.81; 15.65).” The Qur’ān: A
New Annotated Translation, p. 175 n. 1. Droge here seizes upon the parallel use of ’asrā/i.
20
Nöldeke criticized the idea that the servant of God refers to Adam or Abraham, who are not traditionally
said to have made similar visionary journeys. The visionary journey made by Ezekiel from Babylon to Jerusalem to
view the desecrated Temple (Ezekiel 8:3) is closer, but as Nöldeke notes it makes little sense for Ezekiel to be taken
to Jerusalem from the “Sacred Mosque,” which Nöldeke interprets as the Ka’ba – not Babylon. In addition, Ezekiel
was not shown blessed signs via his visionary journey to Jerusalem, but rather outrageous desecrations.
21
The formal bluntness of this interpolation, which breaks the rhyme, suggests that it was a relatively urgent
polemical device which, as Schwally notes, cannot have been placed in its present location by Muḥammad himself.
22
See U. Rubin, “Muhammad’s Night Journey (Isrā’) to al-Masjid al-Aqṣā. Aspects of the Earliest Origins
of the Islamic Sanctity of Jerusalem,” Al-Qantara XXIX 1 (2008) 147-164. Per Rubin, “What is relevant is the fact
that the idea of Jerusalem as a destination of a visionary journey is pre-Islamic. Islam did not have to wait until the
actual Islamic takeover of Jerusalem in order to envision its own prophet experiencing a vision in which he is taken
there at night. Everything seems to indicate that already the Qur’ānic isrā’ verse alludes to such a journey to
Jerusalem. The choice of this particular destination takes the Qur’ānic prophet on a visionary pilgrimage along the
Mecca-Jerusalem axis of sanctity. He is taken to the very heart of the holy land, and this creates a visual contact
between the prophet and the sacred locality of the biblical prophets and links him to their prophetic heritage and
makes him a prophet like them.” But the Qur’ān is otherwise hostile to the idea that a prophet must dwell within the
Holy Land. Every people has its own messenger. The servant’s journey to Jerusalem in Q 17:1 did not make him a
generic prophet. Rather it made the servant’s prophetic status equal to Jesus, a supreme prophet.
23
“Muhammad’s Night Journey,” p. 152.

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5. Q 17:1-8: Straflegenden Concluding with God Sending His Roman Servants to
Occupy Jerusalem, Expel its Disobedient Jews, and Destroy their Temple (Masjid)

We have learned to recognize the centrality of Jerusalem for the earliest stages of Islam.24

The Motiv for the interpolation of Q 17:1 is revealed by its following verses, which constitute a
series of Straflegenden. Q 17:2 states “We gave Moses the Book, and made it a guidance for the
Sons of Israel: ‘Do not take any guardian other than Me!’” Q 17:3 is similarly short, to the point
of being fragmentary, stating only “(They were) descendants of those whom We carried with
Noah. Surely he was a thankful servant.” Parallel Noah anecdotes in the Qur’ān typically
represent Straflegenden (e.g. Q 17:17, 21:77). Noah was obedient to God, and the descendants
of those who listened to God’s messenger (Noah) survived, while by contrast Noah’s disobedient
community was destroyed by God’s aquatic punishment. The ur-text of Q 17:1 likely began this
Straflegenden theme by recounting the Exodus escape, with its watery destruction of the
unbelievers (cf. Q 17:101-104), just like the brief reference to Noah in Q 17:3 reminded its
audience about the salvation of Noah’s followers who joined his escape from the watery
destruction of the unbelievers.
The following Q 17:4-8 forms the core Straflegend, which is far longer and more detailed
than its situating Biblical predecessors (Q 17:1-3), bringing the theme to its apex:
4. And We decreed for the Sons of Israel in the Book: ‘You will indeed foment
corruption on the earth twice, and you will indeed rise to a great height.’
5. When the first promise came (to pass), We raised against you servants of Ours, men of
harsh violence, and they invaded (your) homes, and it was a promise fulfilled.
6. Then We returned to you (another) chance against them, and increased you with
wealth and sons, and made you more numerous.
7. ‘If you do good, you do good for yourselves, but if you do evil, (it is likewise) for
yourselves.’ When the second promise came (to pass), (We raised against you servants of
Ours) to cause you distress, and to enter the Temple as they entered it the first time, and
to destroy completely what they had conquered.
8. It may be that your Lord will have compassion on you. But if you return, We shall
return, and We have made Gehenna a prison for the disbelievers.
God had expelled the corrupt and arrogant Jews from Jerusalem, sending Romans to destroy his
own Temple, which Q 17:7 explicitly calls al-masjid, the mosque, the place of prostration. This
is the only explicit Qur’anic reference to the Second Temple, and its parallel with the masjid al-
aqsā of Q 17:1 is deliberate. Q 17:4-8 here repeats a fundamental late antique Christian polemic
against the Jews. More broadly, “[t]he Qur’an seems to echo traditional themes of Christian
anti-Jewish polemic.”25 As Reynolds puts it, “the Qur’an’s fascination with Jewish perfidy is
rooted in the tradition of Syriac typological exegesis.”26
Consistent with such Syriac Christian polemics, the Jewish corruption vaguely referred to
by Q 17:4-8 was certainly the Jews’ rejection of Jesus, which Q 17:4-8 portrays as a repetition of

24
G. Stroumsa, “Jewish Christianity and Islamic Origins,” Islamic Cultures, Islamic Contexts: Essays in
Honor of Professor Patricia Crone, ed. B. Sadeghi (Leiden 2015): 78.
25
G. S. Reynolds, “On the Qur’anic Accusation of Scriptural Falsification (taḥrif) and Christian Anti-Jewish
Polemic,” Journal of the American Oriental Society 130.2 (2010): 189-202.
26
Ibid.

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the prior Israelite rejections of Moses and Noah (Q 17:1-327), each rejection being punished by
God, and accompanied with a grant of supremacy to those remaining who were faithful
believers. Or as Q 61:14 more explicitly states this same point:
O believers, be you God’s helpers, as Jesus, Mary’s son, said to the Apostles.
‘Who will be my helpers unto God?’ The Apostles said, ‘We will be helpers of
God.’ And a party of the Children of Israel believed, and a party disbelieved. So
We confirmed those who believed against their enemy, and they became masters.
Q 17:4-8 reiterates this same anti-Jewish polemic, explaining that God had granted supremacy to
the Christians and made them his new servants. Because they denied Jesus (just like Pharaoh
had denied Moses, and just as Noah’s community had denied his prophetic authority),28 the
disobedient Children of Israel were condemned to subjugation.
The phrase “if you return, We shall return,” as used in Q 17:8, is commonly read as
meaning that God will punish the Jews if they return to their sinful ways. Certainly the Qur’ān
uses derivatives of the root ‘-w-d (‫ )ع و د‬to designate a return to disbelief or disobedience. But
the specific phrase “if you return, We shall return” (wa-in ʿudttum ʿud’nā) is directly paralleled
only by Q 8:19 (wa-in taʿūdū naʿud), where it designates physical battle in which the mu’minūn
will destroy the disbelievers (kafir). The phrase is bellicose. Since Q 17:8 uses this phrase in
connection with God’s servants expelling the Jews and destroying their Temple, the message is
that the Jews (who the same verse characterizes as kafir destined for Gehenna) are permanently
disfavored, while his Roman servants have been granted rulership over the Holy City.29 If the
Jews try to reverse this state of affairs by deposing their Christian masters, God will punish them.
In the Qur’anic corpus, the uniqueness of Q 17:4-8 lies in its geographical specificity (cf.
the ambiguous Q 61:14), which exalts in the destruction of the Jewish Temple (masjid) in
Jerusalem. Q 17:4-8 delineates God’s plan for the Holy City and its Temple – identifying
Christians as its sanctioned masters, and the old covenant of the Jews as superceded by Christian
rule. This polemic replicates the Christian tradition it derives from. Surat al-Isrā’ is often

27
As interpolated, Q 17:1 has lost its original reference to the exodus of Moses and God’s accompanying
punishment of Pharaoh’s army. The ur-text would have reminded its audience about how Pharaoh had rejected the
prophetic authority of Moses, just like Noah, and Jesus. While rescuing his prophet by nocturnal isrā from Egypt,
God punished the unbelieving tyrant and his followers, leaving the Israelites the triumphant survivors, as recounted
by Q 17:101-104. “And We had certainly given Moses nine evident signs, so ask the Children of Israel [about]
when he came to them and Pharaoh said to him, ‘Indeed I think, O Moses, that you are affected by magic.’ [Moses]
said, ‘You have already known that none has sent down these [signs] except the Lord of the heavens and the earth as
evidence, and indeed I think, O Pharaoh, that you are destroyed.’ So he intended to drive them from the land, but
We drowned him and those with him all together. And We said after Pharaoh to the Children of Israel, ‘Dwell in the
land, and when there comes the promise of the Hereafter, We will bring you forth in [one] gathering.’” (Sahih Int’l
tr.). Before interpolation, Q 17:1-8 would have followed this theme, with the unbelievers destroyed because of their
successive rejections of Moses, Noah, and finally Jesus, followed each time by the faithful inheriting the land.
28
The fact that Q 17:4-8 does not explicitly identify the ‘corruption’ that the Jews caused in the land suggests
its author’s potential discomfort with the idea that rejecting Jesus warranted divine punishment.
29
Q 17:4-8 is not entirely clear about the identity of God’s servants. Paret notes that the Arabic is ambiguous
about the timeframe. Most commentators assume that the Babylonians and Romans are meant, since they
respectively destroyed the First and Second Temples, as a matter of historical fact. Yet the text can also be
interpreted as indicating the second promise was of a future event, which had not yet happened at the time of
composition. The second servants could also designate the Byzantines, led by Heraclius, who had expelled the
Persians from Jerusalem in 629, taking revenge against Hagiopolite Jews who had severely persecuted the
Christians; this revenge would then be seen as a Byzantine repetition of the first Roman destruction of the Temple.
Such possibilities exceed the scope of this article, which proceeds on the more traditional understanding that God’s
servants are the Romans, and that the text refers to their destruction of the Second Temple.

8
curiously close to Christianity in its theological content, an indication of its relatively early
composition date.30 Q 17:73-74 even reports that the messenger ‘almost’ joined his opponents;
we are not told what those opponents believed, but Christology and priestly authority were
presumably the primary doctrinal issues that divided them from the anonymous messenger.31
The pro-Christian polemic of Q 17:2-8 contradicted efforts by later mu’minūn to assert
political and religious supremacy over the Holy Land and its communities. Our earliest
historical account of mu’minūn in Jerusalem describes them as building a mosque on the Temple
ruins. According to the Chronicles of pseudo-Sebeos, written approximately 660 C.E., the
mu’minūn copied Jewish attempts to rebuild their Temple following the conquest of Jerusalem:
I shall also speak about the plots of the rebellious Jews, who after gaining help
from the Hagarenes for a brief while, decided to rebuild the temple of Solomon.
Finding the spot called Holy of Holies, they rebuilt it with base and construction
as a place for their prayers. But the Ishmaelites, being envious of them, expelled
them from that place and called the same house of prayer their own. Then the
former built in another spot, right at the base of the temple, another place for their
prayer.32
Arculf, a pilgrim in the 670s, is similarly reported by Adomnan to have observed:
In that famous place where once stood the magnificently constructed Temple,
near the eastern wall, the Saracens now frequent a rectangular house of prayer
which they have built in a crude manner, constructing it from raised planks and
large beams over some remains of ruins. This house can, as it is said,
accommodate at least 3000 people.33
Writing during the construction of the Dome of the Rock, Anastasius of Sinai likewise
complained that thirty years before (i.e. 660 C.E.) he had heard Egyptian workmen as they
cleared the ruined Temple Mount to build a new place of worship, allegedly with demonic aid.34
This drive to restore worship at the ruined Jewish Temple clashed with Christian
polemics in the mu’minūn’s own Arabic scriptures. Per Q 17:4-8, the Book of Moses had
condemned the Jews to exile from Jerusalem, replacing them with God’s new servants, the
Romans, with the Jewish Temple rightfully desecrated by the Romans at God’s command.
God’s new servants followed a prophet who was crucified and resurrected in Jerusalem itself,
ʿĪsā al-Masīh, unlike the disobedient Moses, who God had punished with death on Mount Nebo
in the Transjordan.35 Christians could hardly refrain from reminding the mu’minūn that they

30
Nöldeke placed Q 17 within his ‘Second Meccan’ period.
31
By this point in Qur’anic composition, the messenger’s putative antagonists are surely Christians, although
they are rhetorically depicted as polytheists. When Q 17:90-96 discusses the antagonists’ objections to the
messenger (for example, insisting that he bring them a Book from heaven that they can read, or bring an angel), their
objections do not make any sense as genuine polytheist discourse. No pagan worshiper of Manat or al-Lat would
have demanded a book from heaven, or demanded to see an angel. These are inter-monotheistic contentions, in
which all sides already accept Biblical tradition as authoritative. Yet the Qur’ān’s rhetorical opponents are subjected
to classic Christian polemics against polytheism, now re-employed against trinitarian Christianity.
32
R. W. Thompson, The Armenian History Attributed to Sebeos, Chapter 43 (Liverpool 1998): 103-4.
33
R.. Hoyland, Seeing Islam as Others Saw It: A Survey and Evaluation of Christian, Jewish and Zoroastrian
Writings on Early Islam (Princeton 1997): 221.
34
Ibid., p. 101.
35
For a discussion of similar Christian use of Islamic traditions to argue for the inferior status of Muḥammad
relative to Jesus, See Krisztina Szilágyi, “A Prophet Like Jesus? Christians and Muslims Debating Muḥammad’s
Death,” JSAI 36 (2009): 131-71. As Szilágyi explains, “Early Muslims saw Muḥammad as a mere mortal with a
divine message, and apart from the misguided judgment of their leaders after Muḥammad’s death, they probably did

9
were God’s successor servants, and the rightful lords of Jerusalem, which God had made the city
of Jesus and his followers – not that of Muḥammad or Moses, who both shared inferior outsider
status, having never set foot in the city.36 Even the mu’minūn’s own Qur’anic recitations
acknowledged the painful truth of Christian supremacy in the Holy City.37
Pilgrimage tied such polemics to ritual. Christian pilgrims sought to encounter a
Jerusalem purified by the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, replacing the sinful Jewish
reign. As Rubin puts it, “[t]he Temple Mount was left in ruins to commemorate the Israelite sin
and punishment. This was the time when, according to the texts, Jerusalem began to turn into a
major pilgrimage site.”38

6. The Qur’anic Account of the Exile and Death of Moses

The power of Christ surpassed the power of Moses.39

To better understand the prophetic asymmetry that necessitated the interpolation of Q 17:1, we
must compare the respective deaths of Moses, Muḥammad, and Jesus.
In Late Antiquity, Jews and Christians believed that Moses had died outside the Holy
Land. Numbers 20:1-13 describes how Moses disobeyed God by striking a rock with his staff to
make water, taking credit for the miracle. As punishment, God barred Moses and Aaron from
leading the Israelites into their promised land. Deuteronomy 34 reports that Moses died on
Mount Nebo, exiled on the east side of the Jordan river, longing for the Holy Land that he had
led his people to.40 Tragically, Moses never lived to see that land conquered by God’s people, its
polytheistic Canaanites subjugated, and the pure faith of the Lord established in Jerusalem.

not find anything embarrassing in his ordinary death. But soon after the dead Prophet’s followers conquered the
Near East, the predominantly Christian inhabitants of those lands compared the story of Muḥammad’s life and death
to the stories of the life and death of those whom they believed he should have resembled: the biblical prophets,
Jesus and Christian saints. Comparing Muḥammad’s death to that of the biblical prophets was not detrimental to his
standing; apart from Enoch and Elijah who, according to the Bible, were translated to heaven alive, the rest were
believed to have died the ordinary death of a mortal. But Muḥammad, in Christian eyes, did not fare well in
comparison with Christ. One of the most significant contrasts between their stories was the end of their lives: the
one disintegrating the earth, the other being resurrected from the dead and ascending to heaven. When compared to
the saints, Muḥammad also failed the test. According to his own followers, Muḥammad’s body putrefied in death;
the corpses of the saints, according to their vitae, resisted decay, emitted sweet fragrance, and their complexions
remained fresh. The all-too-human death of Muḥammad, according to the religious worldview of the Christians, did
not fit his claim to divine authority. The eighth-century Muslim narrative of Muḥammad’s death, as understood by
Christians, made him look inferior to Jesus and the saints, and was thus a useful polemical argument.” Ibid., 155-56.
36
J. W. Drijvers, “Transformation of a City: The Christianization of Jerusalem in the Fourth Century,” Cults,
Creeds and Identities in the Greek City After the Classical Age (Leuven 2013): 320.
37
As Islam emerged, Syriac Christianity recrafted anti-Jewish polemics to serve an anti-Islamic polemical
function, depicting Muslims as repeating the failed Jewish attempt to restore the Temple that Christ had permanently
replaced. See M. Debié, “Muslim-Christian Controversy in an Unedited Syriac Text: Revelations and Testimonies
about Our Lord’s Dispensation,” The Encounter of Eastern Christianity With Islam (Leiden 2006): 225-235.
38
U. Rubin, “Muhammad’s Night Journey,” p. 153.
39
R. Wilken, The Land Called Holy, p. 127.
40
By the 6th century Mount Nebo was seen as an Arab locale, one of the few sites in Arabia that received
major Christian pilgrimage. Being well outside of Chalcedonian Jerusalem, Mount Nebo seems to have evaded the
complex anti-Chalcedonian attitudes towards more conventional pilgrimage goals. “Peter and John, however, did
not limit themselves to the holy places in Jerusalem. We learn indirectly of at least one journey to Transjordan, with
another monk, in order to visit holy sites, especially the tomb of Moses on Mount Nebo. Perhaps John Rufus

10
 The Qur’ān exonerates Moses and Aaron of their Biblical disobedience, but it leaves their
deaths in exile unchallenged. Only obliquely does the Qur’ān acknowledge that Moses never
entered the Holy Land, with Q 5:21-26 blaming the prophet’s exile on his ‘ungodly people’ who
were too cowardly to battle the Canaanites:
“O my people, enter the Holy Land which God has prescribed for you, and turn
not back in your traces, to turn about losers.”
They said, “Moses, there are people in. it very arrogant; we will not enter it
until they depart from it; if they depart from it then we will enter.”
Said two men of those that feared God whom God had blessed,41 “Enter against
them the gate! When you enter it, you will be victors. Put you all your trust in
God, if you are believers.”
They said, “Moses, we will never enter it so long as they are in it. Go forth,
thou and thy Lord, and do battle; we will be sitting here.”
He said, “O my Lord, I rule no one except myself and my brother. So do Thou
divide between us and the people of the ungodly.”
Said He, “Then it shall be forbidden them for forty years, while they are
wandering in the earth; so grieve not for the people of the ungodly.”
Moses calls those who do not enter the Holy Land ‘losers’ (khāsirūn) who should not be grieved
for, but the Qur’ān does not confront the painful fact that Moses and Aaron were themselves
such losers. The ambiguity of Q 5:21-26 suggests that God may have rewarded these two
prophets in some unspecified way, so that they were not khāsirūn. The Qur’ān here extends and
follows the exoneration of Moses and Aaron in the Syriac works of Ephrem, for whom these
Biblical prophets prefigured Christ and transmitted his priesthood.42 This Qur’anic rehabilitation
is constrained by its audience, however, which ‘knows’ that Moses died on Mount Nebo.43
In stark contrast to Moses, late antique Christians maintained that Christ had entered
Jerusalem and saved the world through his crucifixion and resurrection in the Holy City.

7. The Death of Muḥammad – Like Moses, Jerusalem Denied

Then Moses went up from the plains of Moab to Mount Nebo … The LORD said to him,
“This is the land of which I swore to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob, saying, ‘I will give
it to your descendants’; I have let you see it with your eyes, but you shall not cross over

suppressed further information showing Peter and John as typical pilgrims on the conventional pilgrimage routes, in
light of Peter’s later attitude towards the holy places and pilgrimage.” A. Kofsky, “Peter the Iberian,” p. 212.
41
The Biblical Joshua and Caleb. (Numbers 14:5-10).
42
In his Commentary on Exodus, Chapter XXXII, Ephrem largely exonerates Aaron and instead blames the
Jewish people for the golden calf, similar to the Qur’anic account.
43
Rubin argues that for Q 17:2 “The destination of Moses’ exodus is evidently a land upon earth, the Holy
Land, and Lot’s flight is also entirely within the boundaries of the same land.” See “Muḥammad’s Night Journey,”
p. 151. Rubin does not explain his claim that the destination of Moses’ exodus was the Holy Land, and all Jewish
and Christian believers of Late Antiquity would have known that claim to be mistaken (unless Rubin just means
here the intended or desired destination), since Moses famously never led the Israelites into the Holy Land – instead
Moses led them to Mt. Sinai, precisely as Q 17:2 says. This was followed by his wandering, until he died in the
Transjordan. Yet Rubin completes the implicit parallel of Q 17:1, making his Qur’anic Moses enter the Holy Land.
Rubin is thus gripped by the same prophetic asymmetry that required interpolation of Q 17:1. Qur’anic logic was
indeed driving down that path, as with Q 17:1, but it never articulated a truly equal prophetic typology in which
Muḥammad, Jesus, and Moses all entered Jerusalem and claimed its legitimation.

11
there.” Then Moses, the servant of the LORD, died there in the land of Moab, at the
LORD’s command. (Deut. 34:1-5)

In the year 945, indiction 7, on Friday 7 February (634) at the ninth hour, there was a
battle between the Romans and the Arabs of Muhammad [tayyaye d-Mhmt] in Palestine
twelve miles east of Gaza. The Romans fled, leaving behind the patrician bryrdn, whom
the Arabs killed. Some 4000 poor villagers of Palestine were killed there, Christians,
Jews and Samaritans. The Arabs ravaged the whole region. (Thomas the Presbyter,
Chronicle)44

Citing converging threads in our earliest historical evidence, Stephen Shoemaker has argued that
the historical Muḥammad died unexpectedly while leading his followers towards Jerusalem,
accompanied by intense eschatological expectations.45 Islamic traditions “make clear
Jerusalem’s status as an important sacred center in primitive Islam whose prestige rivaled and
indeed seemingly surpassed that of Mecca in the earliest stages ... Mecca did not emerge as the
center of Islam’s sacred geography until somewhat later in the movement’s history.”46
Muhammad’s followers directed their piety towards the Holy Land “almost certainly with
Jerusalem, the eschatological nexus of Abrahamic monotheism, as their ultimate goal.”47
According to this thesis, the prophet’s followers saw his death, before that eschatological goal
was achieved, as an unexpected calamity. Over time, the prophet’s mission was reinterpreted in
a purely Hijazi context, rendering his followers’ dashed expectations moot.
For this article, it suffices to note that (a) Islamic tradition reports that the early mu’minūn
focused their worship on Jerusalem, before turning their qibla to Mecca during the ‘Medinan’
period, an innovation that factions of the mu’minūn evidently criticized (Q 2:142-47); and (b) our
earliest contemporary reports suggest that Muḥammad may have been leading battles in the
Transjordan up to two years after the date (632 C.E.) that is traditionally given for his death.
Likewise, the Doctrina Iacobi, probably dating to the late 7th or early 8th century, depicts
Muḥammad as a messianic figure who proclaimed the imminent second coming of Christ in
connection with his military leadership.48
Shoemaker’s thesis makes good sense of such data. At an early juncture, Muḥammad
was seen by some mu’minūn as having failed to lead the ahl al-Islām to his goal, almost certainly
eschatological and connected with intended Arab conquest of the Holy Land.49 Later Islamic
tradition suppressed the prophet’s ambitions, re-articulating Muḥammad as a purely Hijazi
prophet, divorced from Palestine, with no eschatological expectations tied to his leadership. He
had not failed, and his death was not disastrous.
But Q 17:1 should be considered alongside earlier traditions. Just like Moses, God did
not permit Muḥammad to complete his intended entrance into the Holy Land. The Day of
Judgment never came. Fragments of the sky did not fall as prophesied (Q 17:90).

44
R. Hoyland, Seeing Islam as Others Saw It, p. 120.
45
S. Shoemaker, The Death of a Prophet (Philadelphia 2012).
46
Ibid., 224.
47
Ibid., 223.
48
The Doctrina Iacobi depicts the Saracen prophet as an apocalyptic militant figure who was “proclaiming
the arrival of the Anointed One who is to come, the Christ.” See generally S. Anthony, “Muḥammad, the Keys to
Paradise, and the Doctrina Iacobi : A Late Antique Puzzle,” Der Islam 91.2 (2014): 243-265.
49
This may not have been the view of all the mu’minūn, much less ‘Arab’ elites as a whole, but it appears to
have been a prevailing (and perhaps predominant) view among early Muḥammadan believers.

12
8. Interpolating Q 17:1 to Prevent Qur’anic Endorsement of Christian Supremacy

Thy Lord knows very well all who are in the heavens and the earth; and We have
Preferred some Prophets over others. – Q 17:55 (Arberry)

The problem facing the interpolator of Q 17:1 can now be stated in full. The ur-text of Q 17:1-8
characterized Christian mastery of Jerusalem as the decreed culmination of Biblical precedent.
A perfect prophet had entered Jerusalem, and his followers had (at God’s command, and as
decreed by the Book of Moses itself) expelled the Jews and destroyed their Temple. These
followers and their Christian faith had a superior claim to the Holy City, as the ur-text of Q 17:1-
8 confirmed. Given this Qur’anic endorsement, how could the mu’minūn claim supremacy over
Christian Jerusalem, or seek to rebuild its ruined masjid? God’s new servants had built their
shrines to the West of the Temple ruins, symbolizing God’s new covenant, a purified city now
tied to the physical places of Christ’s death and resurrection. And how could the mu’minūn
claim their prophet was the final prophet, who the People of the Book were obliged to heed? At
best he was a second Moses, lesser than ʿĪsā al-Masīh, just as Jews were lesser than Christians
(see Q 17:1-8, Q 61), and likewise denied a legitimate claim to the Holy City.
Logically, there were two ways to insulate the emerging Islamic faith from such searing
critique. First, Muḥammad must have indeed reached Jerusalem and fulfilled his prophetic
destiny in the Holy City, making him equal to Jesus.50 Second, Muḥammad never failed to reach
Jerusalem because he had never tried to reach Jerusalem. Instead he lived and died almost
entirely within the Hijaz, focusing his pilgrimage entirely on the competing Arabian shrine of
Mecca, with his followers’ early Jerusalem qibla being an abrogated aberration.
The latter solution ultimately triumphed within Islam, along with its vast Heilsgeschichte
apparatus. But Q 17:1 was interpolated to advance the former solution, which required no
seismic shift of sacred geography. It just required establishing that Muḥammad had somehow
traveled to Jerusalem and fulfilled his prophetic destiny there, like Jesus, while also explaining
how Muḥammad could have made that journey unnoticed, unreported, and without leading his
people into the Holy Land.
A difficult problem. So where did this required explanation come from? The perfect
mechanism had already emerged within the primary source of Palestinian demographic and
economic growth during the 4th to 7th centuries, the engine that had transformed pagan Aelia
Capitolina into the Holy City: Christian pilgrimage. Muḥammad had made a form of nocturnal
pilgrimage to Jerusalem, mina l-masjidi l-ḥarāmi ilā l-masjidi l-aqṣā. As he entered Jerusalem
and encountered the city’s blessed precincts, God had shown his Arabian prophet the city’s
sacred signs, conferring upon him prophetic authority over the Holy Land, and helping to
legitimate Muḥammad as the seal of the prophets, both successor to Jesus and his equal.

50
Particularly in its later layers, the Qur’ān confronts the problem of prophetic hierarchy, commanding the
believers to make no distinctions between prophets (Q 2:136, 2:285, 3:84, 4:152). The Qur’anic drive to articulate
equivalence between Jesus and Muḥammad generated a level prophetic typology, diminishing the uniqueness of
Jesus and elevating the status of Muḥammad. This emphatic leveling produced relatively interchangeable prophets.
Stories about one messenger could be recast as stories about another messenger, just as Q 17:1 could be altered from
designating Moses to later designating an Arabian permutation of the same Qur’anic messenger-function. But
prevailing narratives still granted exceptional status to certain Biblical figures, particularly Jesus. Their elevated
status continued to challenge the relative status of the Arabian messenger/prophet.

13
9. The “Night Journey” To Jerusalem In Late Antique Anti-Chalcedonian Christianity

The journey of the Qur’ānic prophet to al-Masjid al-Aqsā is actually a pilgrimage to the cradle
of prophethood.51

Qur’anic Studies has undervalued Christian pilgrimage as a resource for textual analysis. It is
commonly assumed that Meccan pilgrimage is both older than Christian pilgrimage and
independent of it – the hajj and ‘umra of Islamic tradition are seen as inner-Arabian affairs
derived from ‘ancient pagan’ traditions, following how Islamic tradition depicts their origins in
the jāhilīyah. Setting aside whether that assumption is viable, the exclusion of Palestinian
Christian context is unjustifiable when it comes to Q 17:1, since this text describes the servant of
God as being taken to Jerusalem to tour its blessed precincts and witness God’s ‘signs’ there,
mimicking the central Christian pilgrimage of Late Antiquity – not pre-Islamic pilgrimage to
Mecca. And the adjacent text of Q 17:4-8 focuses entirely on Jerusalem and its Temple being
replaced by the rule of Roman Christian servants, making it even more difficult to appreciate
why prevailing late antique Christian traditions and texts about pilgrimage to Jerusalem,
seemingly the most obvious interpretive context for this Qur’anic text, would be overlooked.
Part of the problem is that Q 17 appears to be a relatively early composition, which
Nöldeke assigned to his “second Meccan” period. Its Sitz im Leben is therefore usually pictured
deep within the Hijaz, with Muḥammad dreaming in Mecca about travelling to the fabled object
of his qibla, the holy city lying over a thousand kilometers to his Northwest, which he had never
visited. But the interpolated nature of Q 17:1 is critical. Even by Nöldeke-Schwally’s
conservative account, the verse cannot have been placed in its present position by Muḥammad
himself. In the specific form that has been transmitted to us, the verse does not represent the
proclamation of a historical Muḥammad from within the Hijaz. 52
So we must ask what a night journey from one masjid to see signs at the furthest masjid
in Jerusalem would have meant in a historical context where the mu’minūn were engaged with
late antique Palestine and its traditions of sacred journeys to Jerusalem. If we suspend the
isolating claims of later Islamic tradition, and instead analyze the text in a broader late antique
context, the most straightforward precedent for Q 17:1 consists of the visions and spiritual
pilgrimages of anti-Chalcedonian Christians, which helped believers maintain spiritual contact
with the holy places of Palestine following their annexation by the ‘corrupt’ Chalcedonians.53

51
U. Rubin, “Muhammad’s Night Journey,” p. 164.
52
Weil speculated that Q 17:1 was added during Abu Bakr’s caliphate. This reflects Weil’s assumption that
the living prophet would not have permitted other individuals to add such obtrusive verses, which disrupted the
surah’s rhyme and introduced miraculous new themes. But that view assumes that Muḥammad exercised very tight
control over the entire process of Qur’anic composition, and it is surely reasonable to doubt this assumption. When
we consider that the text may be deeply composite, as Lüling (for example) suggests, then it cannot necessarily be
assumed that Q 17:1 was added after the prophet’s death. In any event, the arguments advanced herein do not
depend on any particular chronology of interpolation, since anti-Chalcedonian influence cannot reasonably be
excluded from any stage of Qur’anic composition. Such influence is present even in the most archaic surahs.
53
By focusing on fifth-sixth century Palestinian context, I depart from more traditional effort to situate the
journey within the visions of Biblical literature. Rubin, for example, explains that “The Qur’ānic night journey to
al-Masjid al-Aqṣā seems to be a vision experienced by the Qur’ānic prophet, much in accordance with similar
visions known already from Pre-Islamic apocalyptic literature. The Book of Enoch already mentions a vision of a
travel to a ‘blessed place’ i.e. Jerusalem, which is situated in the ‘center of the earth.’ The idea of a journey in
vision to Jerusalem is also known from the Old Testament. Nöldeke already suggested that Q 17:1 reflects Ezekiel
8:3 where Ezekiel experiences in Babylon a vision in which he was taken by a lock of his hair and a wind lifted him

14
The preeminent example is presented by Peter the Iberian, the famed late 5th century monk and
bishop of Gaza. Anti-Chalcedonians (i.e. monophysites54) like Peter faced an enormous
disruption of their pilgrimage rituals:
Following the suppression of the monophysite revolt in Palestine, the
monophysites in Jerusalem, in other holy places and in Palestine at large seem to
have faced a particular dilemma in light of the new domination of Jerusalem and
the holy places by the Chalcedonians, and the persecution and expulsion of
monophysite leaders. The predicament of the Palestinian monophysites seems to
have created special problems among local monophysite circles with regard to the
holy places and to pilgrimage to these sites. These issues are exemplified in the
life and times of Peter the Iberian (c. 417-491) – prince, pilgrim, monk, miracle
maker and visionary, bishop and charismatic monophysite master.55
Peter refused to abandon pilgrimage. He was an ardent pilgrim, and could not forswear this
ritual practice. In late antique Christian tradition, the Jerusalem pilgrim retraced episodes from
the city’s Biblical past. By viewing and touching the lingering physical signs of the divine
presence, the pilgrim encountered the transcendent God. So when Chalcedonians seized control
over those physical signs, it created a severe dilemma. “This dilemma posited a collision
between loyalty to the holy places, and fidelity to the true faith. The sincere monophysite living
in the holy places must make his bitter choice either to abandon his attachment to and veneration
of the holy places thereby remaining true to his faith and brethren or to retain communion with
the ‘heretical’ Chalcedonians.”56
How to resolve that dilemma? Peter’s journey is central to the analysis, and its narration
by his follower and biographer John Rufus will therefore be quoted in full:

up between earth and heaven to one of the gates of the Temple in Jerusalem.” U. Rubin, “Muhammad’s Night
Journey,” p. 152. Ezekiel 8:3 is difficult to credit as a proximate influence on the night journey of Q 17:1, because it
recounts Ezekiel’s visionary journey from Babylon to Jerusalem, where he was shown detestable and horrific
idolatry that the Israelites were committing in God’s Temple, followed by a fearsome slaughter of the idolaters.
Admittedly, this does neatly parallel the punishment of Q 17:4-8. It also implies a parallel between the
Chalcedonian ‘heretics’ who ruled Jerusalem during the era of Qur’anic composition and the ‘idolaters’ who ruled
Jerusalem during Ezekiel’s era. Yet Q 17:1 refers to its journey positively, treating God’s signs as a marvelous form
of prophetic legitimation. It lacks the horror and disgust that pervades Ezekiel’s vision of the desecrated Temple.
54
Following scholars like Cornelia Horn, I use ‘anti-Chalcedonian’ rather than ‘monophysite,’ ‘miaphysite,’
‘non-Chalcedonian,’ or ‘Jacobite’ to designate the late antique Christian factions that opposed the Council of
Chalcedon (excluding pre-Chalcedonian factions like Nestorianism, which did not need to oppose the Council). See
C. Horn, Asceticism and Christological Controversy in Fifth-Century Palestine: The Career of Peter the Iberian
(Oxford 2006): 8-9. In addition to the more general reasons given by Horn, this distinction is particularly useful for
Qur’anic studies, because terms like ‘monophysite’ and ‘Jacobite’ tend to imply a significant degree of doctrinal and
ecclesiastical uniformity. The opposition to Chalcedonian Christianity included deeply conflicting positions on
Christology and ecclesiastical authority. Many of those conflicting positions are reflected (as well as criticized) in
the Qur’ān. To conceptualize the heterogeneous Christian opponents of Chalcedon as ‘Jacobite’ or ‘miaphysite’ is
to anachronistically assimilate their complexity with later forms of Christian orthodoxy, much of which crystallized
in the seventh century or later. On the latter point, see J. Tannous, Syria between Byzantium and Islam (2010).
55
A. Kofsky, “Peter the Iberian: Pilgrimage, Monasticism and Ecclesiastical Politics in Byzantine
Palestine,” LA 47 209-222 (1997): 210.
56
Ibid., p. 217. It is difficult to overstate how rabidly many anti-Chalcedonians opposed the Chalcedonians,
who were viewed as a corrupt imperial evil that set out to deny the divinity of Christ and destroy the pure orthodox
faith. “Statements denouncing Chalcedon as the work of the devil, the supporters of Chalcedon as the worshipers of
the devil, and Juvenal as the Antichrist and similar vituperations, appear throughout Rufus’ works to the extent that
the entire empire is depicted as the root of all evil.” Id., p. 218. Other anti-Chalcedonian factions, however, were
much more moderate, and later even operated with explicit imperial sanction (most prominently, Jacob Baradeus).

15
 After these [things], when the time after summer arrived, the blessed one returned
to the brethren in the plain. When he went, some were indignant in their soul and
said, “How when he abode all these days beside Jerusalem, did the blessed one
not desire greatly to enter the Holy City, even if by night, and venerate the
worshipful places, and especially the holy Golgotha and the life-giving tomb?”
The day after his departure, one of the brethren who was very simple and innocent
came and said to them, “I saw a fearful vision this night. For it seemed to me that
I was seeing Abba Peter the bishop, who was saying to me, ‘Can you give me a
hand, brother?’ When he alone took me in this vision to the Holy City, in the
same night in which he was about to depart, he first entered the martyrion of the
holy Stephen, upon which he happened [to come] first. And when he went down
to the cave, he venerated the sarcophagus. And when he went out from there, he
ran to the holy Golgotha and the holy Tomb. And from there he went down to the
church that is called [that] of Pilate and from there down to that of the Paralytic.
And after this, to Gethsemane. When he had gone around also in the holy places
that [are in] its surroundings, after this he went up to the Upper Room of the
disciples, and afterwards to the holy Ascension, and from there to the house of
Lazarus. Next he came upon the road bringing [him] from there until he arrived
at the holy Bethlehem. When he had prayed there, he turned [back] towards
Rachel’s Tomb. And when he had prayed there and in the rest of the temples and
houses of prayer on the road, he went down to [the Church of] Shiloah. From
there, after he had gone up to holy Zion and had completed a holy course and had
worshiped the Lord in every place, finally he returned to the village of Beth
Tafsha, while I, indeed, in every place was supporting him. On the very next day,
[after the one on] which I had seen that vision, the Abba returned to his journey.”
This, however, was [done] so that those who were indignant might be instructed
that the blessed one was offering in every holy place every day, undoubtedly also
at every hour, worship to the Lord in [his] spirit. For it is written, “The spiritual
one judges everything. He himself, however, is not judged by anyone.” When
that brother had told them these [things], those [brethren] fell down upon their
faces and worshiped the Lord.57
Peter made a spiritual night journey to all of the holy places in Jerusalem. This created a
continuous spiritual connection with the city, legitimating the great holy man’s authority against
the corrupt Chalcedonian priests. The monks of Palestine supposedly fell prostrate and
worshiped the Lord when they learned of Peter’s spiritual pilgrimage.
This ritual innovation helped break Palestinian pilgrimage free from its physical center in
Jerusalem, moving the practice to the periphery traveled by ascetics, where spiritualized
pilgrimage became an identity marker for anti-Chalcedonians. “The centrality of pilgrims and
pilgrimage in the Life of Peter the Iberian can hardly be overstated.”58 As Cornelia Horn notes,
the bulk of the Life consists of tales of forced peripatetic exile, adventures on pilgrimage, and
travel tours, all of which facilitated a spiritualized conception of pilgrimage:
The spiritual interpretation of pilgrimage that Rufus presented in this text even
turned Peter into a traveling holy site. Anti-Chalcedonians felt they were barred

57
John Rufus, The Lives of Peter the Iberian, Theodosius of Jerusalem, and the Monk Romanus, tr. by C.
Horn and R. Phenix Jr. (Atlanta 2008): 195-99 (§§ 133-34, R 98-100).
58
The Lives of Peter the Iberian, Introduction by C. Horn and R. Phenix Jr., p. lii.

16
 from many of the churches, especially at places where Chalcedonians formed the
majority of the worshiping community. Their monasteries were forced either to
recognize Chalcedon and enter into communion with Juvenal or to be disbanded.
In order to be able to hold on to a rightful claim to ‘holy places,’ Rufus provided a
new interpretation of the events as well as of the definition of ‘holy place,’ a
definition that suited the actual circumstances of the anti-Chalcedonian
experience in Palestine. Accordingly to that newly defined understanding, holy
places were holy only if the bishop and the believers worshiping there were
orthodox, that is, anti-Chalcedonian. In other words, it was faith, not possession
of a building or even of relics, that conferred holiness and spiritual authority…
Consequently Peter had to be shown as an associate of the great travelers of the
Bible: Moses, Jesus, and Paul; thus he was manifested as the sole true heir to the
biblical and apostolic tradition.59
Peter’s spiritual pilgrimage to Jerusalem is probably the most prominent example of late 5th/early
6th century narratives in which anti-Chalcedonian believers used such ritual innovation to justify
their abandonment of the Palestinian holy places. “For strict anti-Chalcedonians like John Rufus
the proximity of the Holy Places seems to have been one of the most dangerous obstacles for the
strict preservation of faith. The risk of polluting the faith of their fathers through association
with Chalcedonian pilgrims could be averted only by avoiding the Holy Places.”60 The believers
typically received visions of a Biblical figure or saint who authorized their flight, promising that
the believer would henceforth maintain a spiritual communion with the holy place.61 This
allowed the believer to claim spiritual connection to an abstracted and purified form of sacred
space, while avoiding communion with the loathed Chalcedonians. It is this abstracted and
spiritualized idea of pilgrimage that Q 17:1 uses to connect its own servant of God with the holy
places of Jerusalem, claiming their authority for the Arabian prophet.62
This is not to suggest that Q 17:1 passively copied such anti-Chalcedonian precedent, or
viewed it as authoritative. Rather the author of this Qur’anic text cleverly and creatively adapted
the idea of spiritual pilgrimage.63 Such pilgrimage was perfectly suited for asserting the

59
Ibid., pp. lii-iii.
60
J.E. Steppa, John Rufus and the World Vision of Anti-Chalcedonian Culture (Piscataway 2002): 14.
61
See Kotsky, “Peter the Iberian,” pp. 217-18. As Kotsky relates one of several examples, “When the
repression of the monophysites after Chalcedon took place and the priests of the party of the patriarch Theodosius
were banished by the emperor Marcian, Constantine had to decide either to flee the communion of the apostates and
thus deprive himself of the presence of St. John the Baptist; or to remain in Sebaste and become an apostate himself.
Constantine implored the Baptist, in his wisdom, to disclose God’s will. He had a vision of the saint who said:
Priest, do not lose your soul because of me and do not deny your faith. But go and guard your soul untarnished. For
wherever you go, I shall be with you. And Constantine left his beloved saint and his tomb, and escaped Sebaste.”
62
Anti-Chalcedonians used other mechanisms to detach the holy places from Chalcedonian domination. For
example, the martyr Marcellus is reported as having appeared to pilgrims on the road, where he denounced his own
Egyptian shrine and insisted that its land was no longer holy; he had left in protest at the shrine’s seizure by
Chalcedonian heretics. See C. Horn, “Transgressing Claims to Sacred Space: The Strategic Advantage of the
Portability of Relics for Anti-Chalcedonians in Syria-Palestine in the Fifth and Sixth Centuries CE,” Georgian
Christian Thought and its Cultural Context: Memorial Volume for the 125th Anniversary of Shalva Nutsubidze
(1888-1969), ed. T. Nutsubidze, C. Horn, B. Lourié, pp. 45-68 (Leiden 2014): 45. To counter the Chalcedonian
control over the holy places of Palestine, “anti-Chalcedonians highlighted in their life of religious devotion that
relics were endowed with the capability to be used for creating Holy Places of the anti-Chalcedonians’ own
choosing and approval.” Id., p. 46. Again, this innovation helped create decentralized forms of sacred space.
63
The Qur’anic milieu was influenced on many levels by anti-Chalcedonian Christianity. See generally J.
Bowman, “The Debt of Islam to Monophysite Syriac Christianity,” in E.C.B. MacLaurin, ed., Essays in Honour of

17
legitimacy of a pure holy man on the periphery against a heretical imperial center, because that
is precisely what anti-Chalcedonian Christianity had created it for. Facing the same problem—
how to legitimate a holy man by claiming his spiritual communion with sacred space controlled
by heretics—the interpolator of Q 17:1 adopted the same solution. Peter and the Q 17:1 servant
both obtained enhanced religious authority via their journeys to Jerusalem. This legitimation
embodies the distinctive late antique Christian concept of pilgrimage, which emphasized
transforming the individual rather than creating a sense of sacred community. “[T]he essence of
this practice in late antiquity [w]as the desire of the pilgrim—to be in a state of alienation from
the world so as to be able to encounter the sacred rather than the desire to harbor feelings of
communitas … The act of pilgrimage thus served as a vehicle for this self-transformation.”64
Far from being obscure, “John Rufus can rightfully be considered the most prominent
Palestinian anti-Chalcedonian author of the late fifth and early sixth centuries.”65 His influence
was particularly notable in Arabia. As Cornelia Horn has noted, Peter the Iberian and John
Rufus (who was evidently himself a Syrian Arab, and probably a native Arabic speaker) together
played a central role in the initial establishment of anti-Chalcedonian Christianity in Arabia in
the fifth century.66 This has been overshadowed by the incorrect assumption that Arabia was
first converted to anti-Chalcedonian Christianity during the sixth century. “The case of Peter the
Iberian … allows us to correct this view and establish a fifth-century date for the Ghassânids’
initial conversion to anti-Chalcedonianism.”67 During his travels in Transjordanian Arabia, Peter
was hailed by its inhabitants as “a second Elijah and Moses,” but John Rufus depicts his ministry
there as actually surpassing the Old Testament prophets.68
When considering the connections between anti-Chalcedonian tradition and Q 17:1, we
should further recall that Syriac monasticism was a dominant force in the anti-Chalcedonian
movement,69 and Arab conversion to Christianity was largely driven by monks and ascetic holy
men from the Syrian tradition. “[W]e do indeed have numerous accounts of Christian
missionary work among the Arab tribes, in particular, tales of the virtuous lives and miraculous
deeds of Christian clergy and holy men that won the hearts of many a pagan Arab.”70 In Syria,
vast numbers of Arabs reportedly came to witness Simeon the Stylite, converting to
Christianity.71 The Nabateans were reportedly converted to Christianity en masse by a monk

Griffithes Wheeler Thatcher, 1863-1950, pp. 191-216 (Sydney 1965); G. Risse, “Gott ist Christus, der Sohn der
Maria”: Eine Studie zum Christbild im Koran (Bonn 1989). Further, scholars like Gabriel Said Reynolds have
demonstrated that the Qur’ān presumes its audience has a broad background knowledge of Syriac Christian
tradition, a tradition that was dominated in the West by anti-Chalcedonian forms of Christianity.
64
B. Bitton-Ashkelony, Encountering the Sacred, p. 10 (citing the pilgrimage of Peter the Iberian, and
distinguishing late antique Christian pilgrimage from Jewish pilgrimage and medieval Christian pilgrimage).
65
C. Horn, “A Chapter in the Pre-History of the Christological Controversies in Arabic: Readings from the
Works of John Rufus,” Parole de l’Orient 30, pp. 133-56 (2005): 136.
66
Ibid. On the Arab background of John Rufus, see pp. 137-39.
67
Ibid., p. 135.
68
Ibid., p. 144.
69
“Whereas Monophysitism was deeply rooted in Syriac monasticism, Nestorianism appears to have been
more associated with the official Persian church.” I. Toral-Niehoff, “The ʿIbād of al-Ḥīra: An Arab Christian
Community in Late Antique Iraq,” The Qur’ān in Context: Historical and Literary Investigations into the Qur’ānic
Milieu (Leiden 2010): 337.
70
R. Hoyland, “Epigraphy and the Linguistic Background to the Qur’ān,” The Qur’ān in its Historical
Context, ed. G. Reynolds (New York 2008): 59.
71
Ibid.

18
who brought miraculous rain.72 Likewise, Christianity in al-Ḥīra began with monasticism.73
Such monastic efforts to convert and minister to Arab populations often took remarkable forms:
Since the late fifth century, Syriac Monophysite monks were indeed very active
propagators of the Christian faith in Mesopotamia and Iraq, mostly among the
Aramaic peasants and the Arab Bedouin of the so-called “barbarian plain.” This
movement increased significantly with the restrictive anti-Monophysite policy of
Justin I (518–524), which forced many Syrian monks to retreat into the desert
where they concentrated their efforts on the Bedouin. These monks are not easy
to classify. In this period of Aramaic Christianity, various manifestations of
asceticism existed side by side, such as hermits and cenobitic monks. Their
missionary zeal forced them to adapt to the special living conditions in the desert,
e.g., by introducing transportable altars and by practicing baptism with sand.74
It cannot be surprising that Qur’anic composition occasionally exploits useful anti-Chalcedonian
themes and narratives from the fifth and sixth centuries (such as those in the Life of Peter), since
this was the dominant Christian tradition in most Arabian regions.75 Qur’anic argument often
seems contiguous76 with early anti-Chalcedonian efforts to articulate a pure peripheral
Christianity, particularly in the monkish77 early surahs.

72
Petra was reportedly converted to Christianity in similar fashion. “There is a colourful account of the
Nabataean conversion to Christianity in the story of the zealous monk Bar Sauma, famous for never sitting or lying
down. In A.D. 423 he arrived at Petra with forty monks with the intention of destroying that city’s pagan temples
and Jewish synagogues. To prevent this, the inhabitants closed the city gates against them. In response, Bar Sauma
threatened to attack the city and burn it down if they did not let him enter. Petra was then suffering from a four-year
drought, but coincidentally when Bar Sauma arrived it began to rain heavily and the flood waters washed away the
city walls. The pagan priests were amazed by this seemingly miraculous inundation which they interpreted as a
divine intervention and promptly converted to Christianity. Intriguingly, there are no references to pagans being
present in Petra after that date.” K. Politis, “Nabatean Cultural Continuity into the Byzantine Period,” The World of
the Nabateans (Stuttgart 2007): 194.
73
“Syriac sources indicate that Christianity in al-Ḥīra goes back to monastic origins: a certain ʿAbdīshoʿ is
reported to have founded the monastery of al-Ḥīra during the fourth century.” I. Toral-Niehoff, “The ʿIbād of al-
Ḥīra: An Arab Christian Community in Late Antique Iraq,” p. 336.
74
Ibid.
75
Surprisingly few Qur’anic scholars have focused on the connections between anti-Chalcedonian asceticism,
Arabia, and Christological controversy in the late fifth-late sixth centuries. That is disappointing given how well
this milieu suits the emergence of archaic Qur’anic texts and discourse – an Arabic-speaking population that fiercely
opposed the Chalcedonians, seething with Christological controversy, largely bereft of (and often hostile towards)
priestly hierarchy, populating Biblical locations outside the Holy Land, and suffused with ascetic messengers who
followed Syriac Christianity. It is hard to picture a better milieu for the early evolution of Arabic discourse that
privileged pious ascetic messengers against a corrupt ecclesiastical establishment, to the point of creating an
innovative Arabic counter-liturgy and counter-rituals (rejecting sacraments administered by Chalcedonian priests).
Yet traditional conceptions of Qur’anic origins in Mecca, and revisionist conceptions of very late Qur’anic
composition in Syria and Mesopotamia, have tended to overshadow the potential role of this earlier milieu.
76
I use ‘contiguity’ to emphasize that such influence was freely selected and displayed in the process of
Qur’anic composition, rather than being imposed as the doctrinal authority of any particular Christian sect. The
heterogeneity of Christian beliefs in the Qur’anic milieu, which evidently lacked the rigid boundaries of later
orthodoxies, is increasingly recognized by scholars. See, e.g., G. Fisher, “From Mavia to al-Mundhir: Arab
Christians and Arab Tribes in the Late Antique Roman East,” at https://carleton-ca.academia.edu/GregFisher.
77
The Qur’ān is traditionally read as making two explicit references to ‘monks’ (Q 5:82 and Q 9:31-34) and
one reference to ‘monasticism’ (Q 57:27). Holger Zellentin has recently argued that this may be a misreading, and
that the term ruhbān in these verses actually means bishops, not monks. See H. Zellentin, The Qur’ān’s Legal
Culture: The Didascalia Apostolorum as a Point of Departure (Tübingen 2013): 203-228. If Zellentin is right, then
Q 57:27 complains that bishops are a Christian innovation that God did not require, and Q 9:34 criticizes bishops for

19
10. The Signs [Āyāt] of Jerusalem against the Mi‘rāj

It is in Jerusalem, in any case, in the place that stood as the symbol of eastern Christianity,
where the Islamic anti-trinitarian and Christological polemic, as expressed in the inscriptions in
the Dome of the Rock, has its true sitz im leben.78

In Q 17:1, God takes his servant to Jerusalem “that We may show him” (linuriyahu) “of our
signs” (min āyātinā). The journey is required so that God can show his signs to his servant.
God’s signs could not be shown to the servant at the “Sacred Masjid” where he began. Instead,
the signs had to be shown to the servant in “the furthest place of prostration [masjid], where We
had blessed the surroundings” (l-masjidi alladhī bāraknā ḥawlahu). What signs were shown
within these blessed surroundings? Why could they only be shown in this specific geographical
location, the place of prostration in Jerusalem? The text’s geographical specificity contradicts
the traditional narrative that Muḥammad made a mystical ascent (mi‘rāj) into the heavens from
Jerusalem. Q 17:1 makes no reference to the mystical heavenly ascent of Islamic tradition. Both
the text and its following verses have a distinctly terrestrial focus, centered on Jerusalem.
Instead the āyāt mirror the signs that the Christian pilgrim viewed in Jerusalem. Seeing
and touching those signs was the central activity in Christian pilgrimage. The pilgrim comes to
Jerusalem because it is filled with the ‘signs’ of God, which the Christian pilgrim understood as
visible symbols that retained the divine presence from scriptural events. As Wilken explains:
In Christian discourse the terms sign and symbol designated things that could be
seen and touched that pointed beyond themselves. They were tiny windows that
opened on another world ... What did he mean by calling the holy places signs?
These places, writes Gregory, had ‘received the footprints of Life itself’ and for
this reason they are palpable reminders that God once walked this earth. ... By
visiting those places that bear the imprint of ‘life itself,’ the pilgrim was able to
know the transcendent God who was beyond human comprehension.79
The power of these signs was geographically specific, meaning that their power had to be
transmitted through sight and touch in a specific location. Pilgrims could not encounter the
signs’ sacred power anywhere else on Earth (unlike miracles, revelations, recited verses). The
word linuriyahu, as used in Q 17:1, means that the signs were ‘visually shown.’ These visual
signs were not spoken words like Qur’anic recitations, which God could have transmitted to his
prophet anywhere. They could only be seen in Jerusalem, where they were located, because their
sacred power necessarily derived from their physical connection with the city’s Biblical past.
This does not mean that the āyāt of Q 17:1 designate the literal sights of Christian
pilgrimage, such as the tomb of Jesus and the relics of martyrs. Nor do the āyāt designate
competing ‘Islamic’ sights in tangible form. Rather the signs of Q 17:1 are a parallel logical
construct, divine power manifested in Jerusalem, equivalent to the signs of Christian pilgrimage,
much as the Arabic Book was theologically equivalent to the Jewish and Christian Books, and

devouring the wealth of the people. That comports significantly better with late antique criticisms of ecclesiastical
hierarchy, which ascetic monks usually accused of excessive spending and worldly compromise.
78
A.L de Prémare, “‘Abd al-Malik b. Marwān and the Process of the Qur’ān’s Composition,” in The Hidden
Origins of Islam: New research into Its Early History, ed. K.-H. Ohlig and G. R. Puin, pp. 189-221 (Amherst 2010):
193.
79
R. L. Wilken, The Land Called Holy: Palestine in Christian History and Thought (Binghamton 1992): 116-
17 (italics in original).

20
the Arabian prophet equivalent to Jesus and Moses. Qur’anic invocation of these āyāt helped
portray Jerusalem as a city filled with Islamic signs and symbols. Q 17:1 argues for an
Islamicized Jerusalem, just as the Romans had Christianized Jerusalem by replacing Judaism,
which is the central theme of Q 17:4-8. In this sense, Q 17:1 was interpolated to present a
competing Islamic counterpart to Q 17:4-8, replacing the Romans with mu’minūn and Jesus with
Muḥammad, implicitly identified as the servant of God (with the servant’s anonymity reinforcing
the typological equivalence).
Why has this parallel to Christian pilgrimage been obscured by the mi‘rāj? The need to
interpose Hijazi subtext over the text’s overt Palestinian context evidently produced the mi‘rāj
narratives. For later mu’minūn, the servant’s journey had to culminate in a heavenly ascent to
avoid interpreting the āyāt as geographically-specific signs. The surah’s focus on Jerusalem, the
city of Jesus and his followers, clashed with the emerging Islamic understanding of Qur’anic
revelation as oral recitations first transmitted by the angel Jib’rīl to the prophet in Mecca. Being
visual, the signs of Q 17:1 could not be the Qur’anic revelations. Further, the signs could not be
confined to Jerusalem, which would undercut Mecca as the competing locus of prophetic
authority. Accordingly, the signs had to be displaced into an unreachable abstract region. A
prophetic ascent into the heavens, accompanied by fantastic visions, was interjected via exegesis.
Against the mi‘rāj-free interpretation of Q 17:1, it might be objected the that Dome of the
Rock, built around 692 C.E., commemorates the point where Muḥammad ascended to heaven by
the mi‘rāj. But the Dome of the Rock’s inscriptions argue for the equivalence of Jesus and
Muḥammad, portraying both as mere human servants of God. Even setting aside its late date,
nowhere do the building’s inscriptions address heavenly ascents by Muḥammad, or prophetic
dialogues in heaven, an omission inconceivable if the building was originally designed to glorify
visions that followed a heavenly ascent. “Wenn die nächtliche Reise der Grund gewesen sein
sollte, um den Felsendom zu bauen, darf man selbstberständlich annehmen, daß Verse 17, 1 in
den ältesten Inschriften vorkäme. Genau das ist nicht der Fall.”80
Van Esbroeck has argued that the connection between Q 17:1 and the Dome of the Rock
is secondary, with the Dome originally erected to correct and subsume an older theology in
which some Muslims believed the rock bore the footsteps of the anthropomorphic God.81 That
seems correct in part, but the older theology is better understood as the attempt by mu’minūn to
claim that Muḥammad had miraculously set foot in Jerusalem. The competing footsteps of God
were the signs left by his incarnated son Jesus, ritually witnessed by the Christian pilgrim; it is
the attempt by early mu’minūn to depict Muḥammad as equivalent in status to this incarnated
Jesus that gives the misimpression of an anthropomorphic theology held by the mu’minūn.82

80
See M. Van Esbroeck, “Die Quelle der Himmelfahrt Muḥammeds vom Tempel in Jerusalem aus,” Le
Museon 117, Issue 1-2, pp. 175-92 (2004): 188.
81
Ibid., pp. 188-89.
82
See the Wilken quote above, summarizing the significance of Jerusalem: “These places, writes Gregory,
had ‘received the footprints of Life itself’ and for this reason they are palpable reminders that God once walked this
earth.” Wilken, The Land Called Holy, pp. 116-17.

21
11. The Enigma of Qur’anic Pilgrimage to Bakka

It so happens that our ‘Bakka,’ which one finds a single time in the Koran, in a context relating
to the site of worship and pilgrimage, corresponds to a Biblical word ‘Baca,’ which one finds a
single time in the Bible, in Psalms 84:6-7, precisely in a song of pilgrimage!83

Finally, anti-Chalcedonian pilgrimage precedent may help illuminate a related Qur’anic puzzle.
Why does the Qur’ān lack clear reference to the city of Mecca? Why are the two verses that are
traditionally interpreted as explicitly mentioning Mecca’s name so enigmatic and strange (Q
3:96, stating bakka, and Q 48:24, stating makka)?
Regnier long ago showed that the hapax bakka in Q 3:96 (traditionally considered a
variant pronunciation and spelling of Mecca) closely follows Psalms 84:6-7, where the hapax
Hebrew term baca designated a valley of ‘tears,’ not a city called ‘Mecca.’ Psalms depicts baca
as a valley that the Biblical Jews traveled through on their pilgrimage to Jerusalem. Regnier’s
insight appears decisive. The textual parallels are exceptionally strong, and unlikely to be
coincidental.84 But this raises deep interpretive problems.
Q 3:96-97 insists that the ‘first House’ appointed for men was at bakka. “In it are clear
signs: the standing place of Abraham. Whoever enters it is secure. Pilgrimage to the House is
(an obligation) on the people to God – (for) anyone who is able (to make) a way to it.” If
Regnier is correct, why does Q 3:97 command the believers to make pilgrimage to an otherwise
unknown Palestinian valley that Biblical Jews passed through on their way to Jerusalem, exalting
that transitional waypoint as the superior pilgrimage? How can the solitary Biblical reference to
baca be reconciled with Islamic tradition about Mecca? And why would the author of Q 3:96
characterize the obscure valley of baca from Psalms as containing the House of Abraham?
Contiguity with anti-Chalcedonian precedent suggests an elegant solution. We should
understand the reference to bakka as an early Qur’anic effort to create a peripheral Biblical
pilgrimage, asserted against the corrupted Jerusalem pilgrimage. Mu’minūn probably never
made pilgrimage to bakka, which did not designate an actual physical location. The counter-
pilgrimage of Q 3:96 was a literary abstraction derived from Psalms – conceptualized as the pure
original pilgrimage of Abraham, predating the pilgrimages of Jews and Chalcedonian Christians.
The reference to bakka in Q 3:96 evidently represents an attempt at ritual innovation, which
sought to claim authority from a usefully-unspecific pilgrimage reference in Biblical text. Like
other fragments of archaic Qur’anic liturgy and ritual (e.g. Q 97, Q 10685), the bakka pilgrimage
of Q 3:96 seems to have been more literary ambition than a significant ritual reality.86 That early

83
A. Regnier, “Quelques Enigmes Littéraires de L’inspiration Coranique,” Le Muséon 52 (1939): 145-62.
84
For a much fuller discussion of these issues, concluding with a preliminary endorsement of Regnier’s view,
see I. Warraq and M. Gross, “Makka, Bakka, and the Problem of Linguistic Evidence,” Christmas in the Koran:
Luxenberg, Syriac, and the Near Eastern and Judeo-Christian Background of Islam (Amherst 2014): 781-97.
85
I interpret Q 106 as a prayer regarding seasonal pilgrimage, probably either to Jerusalem (for the Encaenia
and Christmas) or else as part of the archaic Qur’anic effort to conceptualize and assert a competing counter-
pilgrimage on the Palestinian periphery; in the latter event, the journeys of winter and summer in Q 106 should be
seen as formalized ritual parallels to Hagiopolite Christian pilgrimage. But this archaic context was not preserved as
functional ritual. Later Islamic tradition re-read this archaic surah as referring to economic journeys, with the
Quraysh taken to be Meccan pagans, despite the surah’s focus on the monotheistic worship of the rabb in his house.
That is why traditional exegesis of Q 106 is so astonishingly confused regarding journeys which, had they genuinely
referred to the central economic livelihood of a Hijazi Quraysh tribe, must have been exceptionally well understood.
86
The hajj and ‘umra are named in just four surahs, all ‘Medinan’ surahs (Q 2, Q 3, Q 9, and Q 22),
suggesting that Meccan pilgrimage emerged at the end of Qur’anic composition, evidently in dispute (Q 2:142-50).

22
ritual ambition, closely modeled on Christian tradition, was soon superceded by further
developments in Qur’anic thought and doctrine.87 The text of Q 3:96 was not conformed to
match those developments, instead retaining its archaic character.88
Qur’anic sacred geography should not, then, be pictured as a binary contrast between
Mecca and Jerusalem.89 Instead it appears to have been a more evolutionary process, moving
beyond fifth-sixth century anti-Chalcedonian efforts to displace an abstracted form of pilgrimage
towards Biblical sites on the Palestinian periphery, accompanied by literary conceptualizations of
a ‘pure and original’ pilgrimage located just outside of Jerusalem.90 Over time, this process of
ritual innovation increasingly privileged a distinctively Arabian sacred geography. That
differentiation eventually culminated in the familiar hajj and ‘umra pilgrimages to Mecca,91
leaving earlier forms like Q 3:96 as orphaned intermediaries.92

87
Many puzzles and transitions in the Qur’anic text can be explained in a similar manner. The usual
objection to interpreting Qur’anic text in close relation with anti-Chalcedonian tradition is that the anti-
Chalcedonians shared an extremely high Christology, while “the Qur’ān” (an anachronism when used to signify a
unified Christological view) asserts a very low Christology, akin to Nestorianism. As I plan to argue in a
forthcoming article, that may be a misleading way to look at the problem. The assumption that Qur’anic
Christology is relatively uniform—often accompanied by an analytical approach that aggressively assimilates
archaic Qur’anic text either to the doctrines of ancient Christian sects or else to later Qur’anic textual layers—has
obscured significant theological innovations displayed in the early textual layers.
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If Q 3:96 is an older fragment of Qur’anic text which was incorporated into the later surah, that origin helps
explain why the verse displays so many grammatical and orthographic oddities. See generally I. Warraq and M.
Gross, “Makka, Bakka, and the Problem of Linguistic Evidence.”
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The reader may recall that the prayer direction of the earliest Islamic mosques tended to converge upon
Southwestern Jordan, near Petra, rather than upon either Jerusalem or Mecca. This intermediate architectural
orientation, perplexing for traditional and revisionist analysis alike, can be understood as embodying an older sacred
geography aligned upon the Palestinian periphery. This older prayer orientation does not establish, however, that
Qur’anic composition itself necessarily took place at or near the geographical center of the older qibla.
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Sixth-century South Arabia presents a parallel, where the Axumite empire seems to have sought to
Christianize the South Arabian landscape and make it holy in a way that consciously imitated Palestinian tradition.
See G. Hatke, “Holy Land and Sacred History: A View from Early Ethiopia,” Visions of Community in the Post-
Roman World: The West, Byzantium and the Islamic World, 300-1100 (Farnham 2012): 259-75.
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Another Qur’anic enigma can be explained here. Why does Q 9:3 say that God and his messenger
announced on the “day of the great pilgrimage” (yawma al-ḥajj al-akbar) that they were free of any obligations to
the mushrikūn? Uri Rubin has argued that this day was Muḥammad’s farewell pilgrimage to Mecca in 632 C.E.,
which was combined (!) with the Easter and Passover pilgrimages of the Jews and Christians; at that farewell
pilgrimage, the prophet ordered that the ḥajj was thereafter separated from these pilgrimages. See U. Rubin, “The
Great Pilgrimage of Muḥammad: Some Notes on Sūra IX,” Journal of Semitic Studies 27 (1982): 241-60. A more
plausible explanation is that the yawma al-ḥajj al-akbar designated the true Hijaz-centered pilgrimage, as an
innovation that rejected the believers’ earlier pilgrimage orientation towards Palestine (now castigated as mushrikūn
ritual). But Rubin is surely correct that the abolition of the nasī’ (intercalation) in Q 9:37 was another innovation
that was intended to further separate the believers’ pilgrimage from older Christian pilgrimage. Id., p. 251. Other
references to pilgrimage in the Qur’ān, particularly in Q 2, may designate true Meccan pilgrimage.
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This may also explain why the Qur’ān laments that the alladhīna kafarū (those who have disbelieved) have
made the masjīd al-ḥarām (the sacred place of prostration) inaccessible to the believers (Q 22:25-26, Q 48:24-27).
Jerusalem, as the believers’ object of ritual desire, had been made inaccessible by the Chalcedonian corruption. This
anti-Chalcedonian lament later became expressed as the Qur’anic literary theme of frustrated pilgrimage, now
detached from its original context and developed into new literary forms that railed against the polytheist oppressors.

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12. Conclusion

Q 17:1 should be understood as a forceful Qur’anic argument, grounded in its

contemporary context and relating closely to its following verses, not as relating miraculous
heavenly ascents extrinsic to the text. The verse’s argument repeats fundamental Qur’anic
themes. It seeks to legitimate the Arabian prophet by constructing a parallel with Jesus, helping
armor the emerging faith against competing Christian claims of superiority.
This concrete contextual meaning, intimately connected to religious ritual and identity in
the Holy Land, became obscured and overwritten by the systematic exegetical efforts of later
Muslims to relocate and seal the Qur’ān’s interpretive context almost entirely within the Hijaz,
assigning the authorship of the Qur’anic corpus solely to Muḥammad.
By broadening the interpretive approach to include late antique Palestinian pilgrimage
traditions,93 we can see that Q 17:1 is not a disconnected accident of surah compilation, only
comprehensible to those who possess an extrinsic body of ‘insider’ knowledge about
Muḥammad’s life. Rather the verse was composed to operate as an efficient polemical weapon
within broader currents of late antique discourse. Its argument would have been readily
comprehensible to the early mu’minūn and their rhetorical counterparts.

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A final example of how Christian pilgrimage tradition has been underutilized in Qur’anic studies: Scholars
have made great efforts to decipher the term ṭuwā used in Q 20:12 and 79:16, where God spoke to Moses through
the burning bush bi-l-wādi l-muqaddasi ṭuwā. See, e.g., A. Rippin, “The Search for Ṭuwā: Exegetical Method, Past
and Present,” The Coming of the Comforter: When, Where, and to Whom?, ed. C. Segovia & B. Lourie (2012): 399-
421. Yet such efforts do not generally consider the reports by late antique pilgrims regarding their visits to the
sacred valley of Mount Sinai, by the Arabian peninsula, where pilgrims witnessed the ‘burning bush’ in the same
valley where Moses encountered it (St. Catherine’s monastery was later built at this location). Starting with the late
fourth century Egeria’s Travels, these reports do not name the valley, but rather just identify it as the anonymous
valley adjacent to Mount Sinai. See Egeria’s Travels, tr. J. Wilkinson, 3d ed. (Oxford 2006): 101-115 (“[W]e had
come right down the Mount and reached the Bush. This, as I have already said, is the Burning Bush out of which
the Lord spoke to Moses, and it is at the head of the valley with the church and all the cells.”); J. Wilkinson,
Jerusalem Pilgrims Before the Crusades (2014 Oxford): 146-7 (Piacenza pilgrim), 211 (Epiphanius the monk). This
supports the theory that the Qur’anic ṭuwā derives from the Syriac ṭur, meaning mount (i.e. Sinai), and answers the
question recently posed by Joseph Witztum as to why a valley would be described by the term for a mountain. See
D. Stewart, “Notes on Emendations of the Qur’ān,” The Qur’ān in its Historical Context, ed. G. Reynolds (New
York 2008) : 236-37. Egeria also reports that “our route was first to ascend the mount of God, which is in sight here
[because] the ascent was easier by the way we were coming, and then to descend to the head of the valley where the
bush was, that being the easier descent, so we determined, having first seen all that we desired, to descend from the
mount of God so as to arrive at the place of the bush, and thence to return on our journey throughout the whole
length of the valley[].” This may support the alternative argument that ṭuwā should be understood as an adjectival
form of the verb ṭawā, equivalent to an active participle, meaning “turning around.” See M. Kropp, “‘People of
powerful South Arabian kings’ or just ‘people of their kind we annihilated before’? Proper noun or common noun
in Qur’ān 44:37 and 50:14,” Proceedings of the Seminar for Arabian Studies 39 (2009): 237-44. We could then see
this as the valley of turning around or returning back from mount Sinai. Egeria reports that pilgrims turned around
and returned from Sinai, reversing their lengthy journey down the valley (just like Moses did), retracing their steps.
“So also did the children of Israel return from Sinai, the mount of God, to this place by the way they had come.”
The problem cannot be resolved here, where instead the principal point is that such late antique context, involving
an important contemporary ritual practice in the Arabian region, should not be excluded from the textual analysis.

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