By; Dr. Amrani-Hanchi, M.

Introduction

The historicity of the Exodus, as well as it’s dating in absolute universal historic time, have always been pivotal for the three sister’s religions of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, despite the great divides that have separated them over many other pertinent issues.

The event, in itself, is not a matter of dispute between the three faiths, since acknowledged by their three relevant scriptures, which for Moslem in particular, represent one and the same source, corrected and sealed by the Koran; the infalsifiable autograph for them all.

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Thus, knowing the exact date of the historical event will serves, not only to locate the Patriarchal époques exactly, but will serve also as an absolute dead reckoning for Abraham’s monotheism.

Interestingly enough, this issue concerning “Historicity”, has always raised within the Judeo-Christian-secular’s scholarship, uninformed of the Islamic paradigm, the pertinent question of whether or not a text prepared long after the event (that is a secondary text and not an autographic one) is likely to be historically accurate, since the text of Exodus, as admitted by mainstream biblical criticism, was prepared centuries after the events it describes!

So, it would come as a big surprise to discover, that Islamic scholarship, possessing an autographic text; the Koran, does not suffer from such wavering and has developed accordingly a monolithic solid stance (consensus) on the issue, amenable easily to external falsification through the many impartial and objective tools of scientific enquiry.

This Judeo-Christian-secular dithering has much to do, as we will discover below, with the Biblical “textus receptus”, which is structurally of a secondary nature (that is; not true autographs but only copies of copies).

This state of affairs, as expected, is not conducive to produce a consensus on the issue and has given rise to three main antagonizing splinter group namely; conservatives, liberals, and secularists1.

Now, before embarking on detailing the Islamic stance on the subject, which is the main drive behind this essay, it would seem didactically appropriate, to have at least a bird’s view of the Judeo-Christian-secular’s scholarship results, which we will take as a yardstick against which the Islamic approach is to be compared.