Why I Am a Salafi. Michael Muhammad Knight

n first addressed people who did not need more information regarding a man who lived among them (or the man himself, who did not need to have his own biography reported to him). Grounded in its own urgent present—promising an end of the world that could come at any second and asking how believers might react if Muammad dies in the days to come, while neglecting to offer plans for such a scenario—we could question the Qur’n’s investment in its future readers. Reflecting on what the Qur’n does not say, the points at which it displays no need to contextualize itself or explain its references, I confront the gulf between the Qur’n’s world and mine: The Qur’n speaks to a here and now that I cannot touch. The Qur’n describes Allh’s production and storage of knowledge in terms of pens and tablets; relying on the technology of its moment, the divine archive cannot shift to digital storage or even graduate from papyrus to paper.

      According to traditional sources, the Qur’n’s revelation occurred in bits and pieces over the course of twenty-three years. Many of these fragments explicitly referred to incidents and controversies in Muammad’s life, and, therefore, the lives of those around him, the people for whom the Qur’n calls him ibukum. The Qur’n does not read as Allh’s monologue, but rather as one half of a dialogue. When I read about the Companions, the boundary between their lives and the Qur’n dissolves. “They ask you” (yas’alnaka), says the Qur’n to Muammad, before giving him an answer; this occurs numerous times in the Qur’n, including several instances within a relatively compact sequence in sra 2 on topics such as the new moon (2:189), charity (2:215), the prohibited month (2:217), wine and gambling (2:219), orphans (2:220), and menstruation (2:222).¹¹ As the German physicist Werner Heisenberg had famously remarked, “What we observe is not nature herself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning”;¹² the speaker in the Qur’n is not simply Allh, but Allh as produced in the Companions’ questions of him. If we read the Qur’n as a twenty-three-year series of responses to the changing lives of its audience, the Companions suddenly appear to have a degree of agency in determining the Qur’n’s content—and even its delivery, as tradition suggests that the revelations briefly ceased due to poor fingernail hygiene among the Companions. The revelations did not include women as addressees until one of Muammad’s wives asked him why, after which the voice of the divine became more inclusive.

      The Companions are said to have behaved carefully in Muammad’s presence, fearful that they could end up as the subjects of a verse;¹³ nonetheless, the Qur’n is filled with their traces. The Qur’n does not usually name them; those for whom the Qur’n called Mu