The Problem of the Quranic al-ṣamad - Part 1
The first section of a new article on the meaning of Sura 112 and the Quranic conception of God
In her recent quranic study Angelika Neuwirth makes a compelling argument that sura 112 (commonly titled al-Ikhlāṣ) makes intentional reference to Deuteronomy 6:4, often termed the Jewish creed, and to the Nicene-Constantinopolitan creed of 381 ce, making the short sura a form of commentary on key elements of Jewish and Christian belief that gives succinct expression to the Muslim concept of God. Neuwirth’s theory would match the sura’s first verse, qul huwa Allāhu aḥadun,[1] with Deuteronomy’s shmaʿ Yisraʾel, adonai elohenu adonai eḥad,[2] both of which direct listeners toward monotheistic belief in a single divinity. Neuwirth then connects the remaining verses with the opening section of the Nicene creed, first composed in Greek.[3] Specifically, Neuwirth’s proposal links Q 112:2 with the first line of the Nicene creed’s reference to God as almighty, the third verse with “God’s only begotten son, begotten from the Father / begotten, not created,” and the fourth with the son being of “one essence” with the father, a concept sometimes rendered in English as consubstantiality. In other words, ṣamad is equated with pantokrator (almighty), the verbal forms of walida (to give birth) with gennēthenta (begotten), and kufuwan (equal)[4] with homoousion (of one essence or substance).[5]
The terminology, grammar, and meaning of the third to last sura have all generated huge debate in both traditional Muslim and modern Western scholarship. In the standardized ʿUthmānic codex, the sura contains not just one hapax legomenon—ṣamad—but two, in that kufuʾ occurs nowhere else in the Quran, and even three, if we consider that 112:1 proffers the sole case of aḥad as an adjective, in contrast to its use as a noun in 112:4 and elsewhere in the text. Islamic tradition elaborates both aḥad and ṣamad as among the ninety-nine names of God. It also records numerous alternative names for the sura—al-Ikhlāṣ is the fourth of twenty listed by al-Rāzī (d. 1210), including al-Tawḥīd by which it is commonly known in Shiʿi tradition[6]—and, while divided over whether the sura is Meccan or Medinan, the tradition leans toward Mecca.[7] Modern scholarship has also suggested that the sura be considered a pilgrim prayer (talbiya), not least since it precedes two suras that are clearly worded as talismanic invocations (sg. taʿwīdh).[8] To this point, some scholars have regarded sura 112 as a counterpoint to the opening al-Fātiḥa, so that the final suras, 113 and 114, would have been added during the process of edition and canonization under ʿUthmān (r. 644–656).[9] Indeed, sura 112 is the final sura in the recension of Ibn Masʿūd (d. ca. 653) preserved in the tradition. Ibn Masʿūd also gives the most radical alternative wording among the variant readings: he omits qul in the first verse and replaces aḥad with al-wāḥid (which resolves the grammatical problem that exercised the minds of classical exegetes of how to parse huwa Allāh aḥad), includes only al-ṣamad in the second, and reverses order in the third (lam yūlad wa-lam yalid).[10] Theodor Nöldeke and John Wansbrough considered it to be among the quranic verses for which qul serves to indicate the liturgical instruction of a lectionary.[11]
While incomplete quranic manuscripts that have been dated to the 600s do not appear to include the sura,[12] the verses feature in the outer wall inscriptions of the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem, completed under the caliph ʿAbd al-Malik in 692, and on gold, silver, and copper coins minted across the empire from 77h (696f.), and possibly as early as 75h, as part of ʿAbd al-Malik’s post-civil war reforms, aimed at asserting identity, orthodoxy, and legitimacy before a highly heterogeneous population in terms of belief and language.[13] The outer inscriptions on the Dome of the Rock mix various bits of quranic material (35:56, 17:111, 64:1, 57:2) with talbiya-style invocations around the theme of one God and Muḥammad as his messenger, leading with the entirety of sura 112 (including qul huwa and preceded by bi-smi llāh al-raḥmān al-raḥīm lā ilāha illā llāh waḥdahu lā sharīka lahu).[14] The first in a series of gold coin issues from 77h extracts what appears to have been considered the main message of the sura in using only the words Allāh aḥad Allāh al-ṣamad lam yalid wa-lam yūlad and omitting 112:4 (with lā ilāha illā llāh waḥdahu lā sharīka lahu on the reverse side),[15] while some of the silver coins issued from 79h give the sura in full.[16] Minting such coins from Spain to Central Asia until its collapse in 750, the Umayyad state appears to have deployed the sura as a fundamental statement of official ideology and one directed first and foremost at its Christian subjects, who were most likely a demographic majority within the empire’s central lands at this time, with an increasing percentage of Arabic speakers among them. But, at least in numismatic terms, the declaration lost its prominent status in the early Abbasid era, by which time the sectarian map had evolved significantly.
In view of the long debate in scholarship over the meaning of ṣamad, this article examines Neuwirth’s theory to ask what other possibilities there may be within the framework of understanding the sura as a dialogue with existing monotheistic credos. In aligning “of one essence” with “equal to him” Neuwirth seems to gloss over the question of ṣamad, which she translates according to convention as “the constant” and “the absolute,” saying nothing further about the matter. In lectures she has also used the word “firm.”[17] This apparent uncertainty over what to do with ṣamad is expressed openly in an entry on the database of the Corpus Coranicum project led by Neuwirth. The entry, authored by David Kiltz, Veronika Roth, and Nicolai Sinai, states that ṣamad is a problematic term possibly expressing the Old Testament concept of God as a rock (Hebr. ṣūr) in various passages (Deut. 32:4; Ps. 18:3, 29, 31, 19:15, 31:3, 78:35, 144:1; Is. 26:4, 44:7–8; 2 Sam. 22:32), a theory that Semitic language scholar Raimund Köbert proposed in 1961.[18] They further note that in some of the Old Testament examples, such as Isaiah 44:7–8, the statement that God is a rock is accompanied by the statement that nobody is equal to God, giving further parallels to the concepts expressed in sura 112. However, supporting a link to the Nicene creed, they add that ṣamad is “at least functionally (although probably not semantically) equivalent to παντοκράτορα (pantocrat).”[19] In other words, they acknowledge confusion over what to make of ṣamad while still choosing to align it with pantokrator.
Given the strength of the argument that sura 112 is overtly referencing the Jewish and Christian creeds, it would be reasonable to think of ṣamad as intended to reflect something in those texts. And in view of the correlation between Q 112:1 and the Shmaʿ, and the fact that the rest of the Shmaʿ passage does not appear to offer further avenues for exploration, Neuwirth has sensibly looked to the Nicene creed instead.[20] But the notion that pantokrator is the word or concept in question seems problematic. In Neuwirth’s favor, the quranic text on one occasion places God’s “power over the heavens and earth” at the head of a formulation that reads as a variant response to the Nicene creed, as if the ṣamad of Q 112:2 was an alternative for expressing “He who has power over the heavens and earth, who had no offspring, who had no partner in power, and who created everything according to his decree.”[21] But this language is used elsewhere—six instances where God’s power (mulk) over the heavens and earth is asserted (Q 3:189, 5:120, 25:2, 35:1, 57:2, 64:1) and two in which he is the one in whose hand is authority (malakūt) over all things (23:88, 36:83), while ṣamad stands enigmatically alone. Further, the quranic text contains numerous other single descriptors of God that attest to his power. He is al-ʿazīz (59 times), ʿazīz (28 times), and solely qadīr (43 times, including 37 times as specifically ʿalā kulli shayʾin qadīr). He is also shadīd al-ʿiqāb (2:221, 3:11, 5:98, 8:13, 8:25, 8:52, 40:22, 59:4), al-jabbār (59:23), al-qādir (6:65), al-ʿalīm al-qadīr (30:54), ʿalīm qadīr (35:44, 42:50), and al-muqtadir (18:45, 54:42). In terms of eternal and everlasting, common translations of ṣamad, the Quran already describes God as al-qayyūm (2:255, 3:2, 20:111, always preceded by al-ḥayy) and al-awwal wa-l-ākhir (57:3),[22] and although he is not specifically al-bāqī—a non-quranic name of God listed among the ninety-nine of the later tradition—he is at one point abqā (20:73), while on other occasions it is “that which God has” (mā ʿind Allāh) that is bāqin (16:96) and abqā (28:60, 42:36), and God’s face (wajh) that will remain (yabqā) while all else perishes (55:27). In other words, there is no shortage of scriptural terms for what ṣamad has been theorized as expressing, which makes one wonder why the text would introduce an innovative new term for a well-worn concept.
The proposal of this article is that while, as a word, ṣamad may well have been plucked from the linguistic and ideational context of Arabic-speaking communities in the late antique Hijaz, the Quran infused it with a new meaning entirely, which was intended as a rejection of the matrix of Christian theologies centered on the theme of God as man and as an assertion of God’s indivisible, transcendent nature as a category apart from creation. In this context, the Nicene creed’s ousia is a more plausible reference point for the notion of God as ṣamad, an Aristotelian concept at the heart of intense theological and philosophical debate in the centuries preceding the Islamic revolution. Further, early Muslim and Christian interpretations in fact express this rationalist concept of divinity as the strongest among the various meanings offered for the verse, if in highly opaque language. However, later Islamic tradition and modern scholarship came to lean toward a preference for notions of God’s power and eternality, a preference that was accompanied by efforts to locate the word’s origin in pre-Islamic Semitic cognates in the Arabian Peninsula and Fertile Crescent, as per the traditional paradigm of a pristine Arabian Islam emerging whole from the peninsula, as if this would unlock the word’s meaning.[23] To argue this, in broadly chronological order, I will first briefly review pre-Islamic intellectual discourse around the question of creation and the nature of God (§1) and then look at pre-Islamic epigraphical evidence for the use of ṣamad and its cognates in pre-quranic script (§2), before turning to early and later Islamic commentaries on the quranic word (§3) and how it was treated in Christian polemical literature (§4), and finally to the approaches of modern scholarship regarding the issue (§5).
[1] The sura reads: qul huwa Allāhu aḥadun / Allāhu al-ṣamadu / lam yalid wa-lam yūlad / wa-lam yakun lahu kufuwan aḥadun (Say he is God one / God the ṣamad / He has not begotten and was not begotten / And no one is his equal). All Quran translations are my own.
[2] “Listen Israel, the lord is our God, the lord is one.”
[3] “We believe in the one god, the Father, the almighty, who created everything, heaven and earth, the visible and the invisible world. And in the one Lord Jesus Christ, God’s only begotten son, begotten from the Father before all time: God from God, light from the light, true God from the true God, begotten, not created, of one essence with the Father.”
[4] The word in the nominative has several forms, the most common of which is kufuʾ; the most common reading of the word in its accusative form in 112:4 is kufuwan, adding the wāw.
[5] A. Neuwirth, The Qurʾan and Late Antiquity: A Shared Heritage, tr. S. Wilder (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 2013), 477–81. Neuwirth first outlined her ideas on the Shmaʿ in Studien zur Komposition der mekkanischen Suren, 2nd ed. (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2007), 26.
[6] Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī, Mafātīḥ al-ghayb, 32 vols. in 16 (Beirut: Dār al-Fikr, 1981), 32: 175–76. Beyond their use as titles for this sura, the words ikhlāṣ and tawḥīd do not themselves appear in the quranic text.
[7] T. Nöldeke et al., The History of the Qurʾān (Leiden: Brill, 2013), 88.
[8] M. Kropp, “Tripartite, but Anti-Trinitarian Formulas in the Qurʾānic Corpus, Possibly Pre-Qurʾānic,” in New Perspectives on the Qurʾān: The Qurʾān in Its Historical Context 2, ed. G. S. Reynolds (New York: Routledge, 2011), 247–64, esp. 261–64.
[9] E. I. El-Badawi, The Qurʾān and the Aramaic Gospel Traditions (New York: Routledge, 2014), 211 n. 5. M. Pregill, in The Qurʾān Seminar Commentary, ed. M. Azaiez et al. (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2016), 453–54.
[10] A. Jeffery, Materials for the History of the Text of the Qurʿān: The Old Codices (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1937), 113.
[11] J. Wansbrough, Quranic Studies: Source and Methods of Scriptural Interpretation, 2nd ed. (New York: Prometheus Books, 2004), 14.
[12] The upper text of the Sanaa Codex, which consensus views as late 600s, early 700s, includes material covering verses up to sura 60; A. Hilali, The Sanaa Palimpsest: The Transmission of the Qur’an in the First Centuries AH (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2016), 17, 21–22, 246–47. The more fragmentary lower text also includes text from suras 62, 63, 75, 76, 78, 79, 80, 83; see E. Cellard, “The Saṇʿāʾ Palimpsest: Materializing the Codices,” Journal of Near Eastern Studies 80.1 (2021): 1–30, esp. 14. The material on which the lower text is written has been carbon dated to 671 at the latest but is possibly pre-Umayyad; B. Sadeghi and M. Goudarzi, “Ṣanʿāʾ 1 and the Origins of the Qurʾān,” Der Islam 87.1 (2012): 1–129, at 8.
[13] The writer ʿAlī ibn Abī Bakr al-Harawī (d. 1215) reports finding a tombstone inscription in Cyprus dated to 29h that includes al-Ikhlāṣ, but it has never been found and would be extremely early for quranic material on an inscription; al-Ishārāt ilā maʿrifat al-ziyārāt (Cairo: Maktabat al-Thaqāfa al-Dīniyya, 2002), 53. See A. Elad, “Community of Believers of ‘Holy Men’ and ‘Saints’ or Community of Muslims? The Rise and Development of Early Muslim Historiography,” Journal of Semitic Studies 47.2 (2002): 241–308, at 284–87.
[14] The text of the inscriptions can be found at https://www.islamic-awareness.org/history/islam/inscriptions/dotr. See O. Grabar, The Dome of the Rock (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard Univ. Press, 2006); and G. Necipoğlu, “The Dome of the Rock as a Palimpsest: ʿAbd al-Malik’s Grand Narrative and Sultan Süleyman’s Glosses,” Muqarnas 25 (2008): 17–105.
[15] J. Walker, A Catalogue of the Muḥammadan Coins in the British Museum, 2 vols. (London: Trustees of the British Museum, 1941–56), 2: 84.
[16] Ibid., 104.
[17] “The Qurʾān: A European Text,” Lecture, The Warburg Institute, March 16, 2012;
c.24.40 mins (accessed 26 May 2021).
[18] R. Köbert, “Das Gottesepitheton aṣ-ṣamad in Sure 112,2,” Orientalia n.s. 30.2 (1961): 204–5. He notes that Samuel 22:32 and Psalm 18:31 are reminiscent of the Muslim shahāda and ikhlāṣ in saying, “For who is God except Yahweh and who is a rock except our God?”
[19] D. Kiltz, V. Roth, and N. Sinai, “Jesaja 44:6–8 - TUK_0379,” in Texte aus der Umwelt des Korans, https://corpuscoranicum.de/kontexte/index/sure/112/vers/2/intertext/379/ (accessed January 31, 2021).
[20] Elsewhere in the Quran, the creed is possibly the referent of Q 38:7’s al-milla al-ākhira (the previous creed). See A. J. Deus, “The Umayyad Dynasty’s Conversion to Islam,” Social Science Research Network (June 1, 2013), p. 3, http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2370687.
[21] Q 25:2: alladhī lahu mulku l-samawāti wa-l-arḍi wa-lam yattakhidh waladan wa-lam yakun lahu sharīkun fī al-mulki wa-khalaqa kulla shayʾin fa-qaddarahu taqdīran.
[22] Emran El-Badawi (Qurʾān, 205 n. 133) sees this phrase as a reference to God as “the alpha and omega” in Rev. 1:8, 21:6, and 22:13.
[23] The paradigm in the early twenty-first century shifted to an Arabia heavily suffused with the religious ideas of the wider Middle East, from a late twentieth-century view of the Quran generated on the fringes of the Fertile Crescent; Ch. Melchert, Before Sufism: Early Islamic Renunciant Piety (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2020), 13.