Why I Am a Salafi. Michael Muhammad Knight

ibukum, “your companion,” serve this concern, promising that there is nothing in him from a jinn (34:46) and that he is not majnn, “jinn-possessed” (81:22). Some Muslims, arguing that Muammad should not be seen as representing the crucial essence of Islam, choose to emphasize the Qur’n’s paucity of direct references to him.

      There’s another way to look at it: The Qur’n is always talking about Muammad and his community, because even if people hold the Qur’n to be eternal and universal, the words must still make sense in their own world. A close read might suggest that the Qur’n employs previous prophets as stand-ins for Muammad; when the Qur’n speaks of the rejection and mockery of Noah by his people, we are supposed to learn something about Muammad’s experience. In Muammad’s time, the consistency of these stories—a prophet comes to warn his people, they ignore him, and Allh subsequently removes them from the planet via natural disasters—would have served as a warning to the people of Mecca. The Qur’n asks that its audience consider the fate of these previous peoples. If Moses dominates the Qur’n’s stories, it could lead us to consider that Moses, more than any other prophet, reflects the prophetic archetype in which the Qur’n casts Muammad.

      It is usually the people around Muammad that we call ab; for the Qur’n to call him ibukum reorients our perspective. For his ab, 53:2 referred to a man with whom they walked, spoke, and ate. My companion, as I know him, has no face; he is more or less a fictional character in my dreams. For the companions of my companion, he had a face that could be observed and remembered; after his death, they shared memories of his eyes, cheeks, hair and beard, complexion, and even the sweetness of his breath. Muammad was their companion in lived reality beyond the verses, so it could not have been the Qur’n alone that made him their ib. Instead of decentering Muammad, therefore, his apparent marginalization in the Qur’n threatens to decenter us. We can choose to read ourselves as addressees of the your in your companion, or we can find the Qur’n speaking to its moment with an immediacy that pushes us out. The Qur’