“The Koran is a text soaked in monotheistic thinking, filled with stories and references to Abraham, Isaac, Joseph and Jesus, and yet the official history insists that Muhammad,
an
illiterate camel merchant, received the revelation in Mecca, a remote,
sparsely
populated part of Arabia, far from the centers of monotheistic thought,
in an
environment of idol-worshiping Arab Bedouins”.
Alexander Stille
According
to the same writer, Alexander Stille:
https://www.nytimes.com/2002/03/02/arts/scholars-are-quietly-offering-new-theories-of-the-koran.html
Scholars Are Quietly Offering New Theories of the Koran
By Alexander Stille
- March 2, 2002
To Muslims the Koran is the very
word of God, who spoke through the Angel Gabriel to Muhammad: ''This book is
not to be doubted,'' the Koran declares unequivocally at its beginning.
Scholars and writers in Islamic
countries who have ignored that warning have sometimes found themselves the
target of death threats and violence, sending a chill through universities
around the world.
Yet despite the fear, a handful
of experts have been quietly investigating the origins of the Koran, offering
radically new theories about the text's meaning and the rise of Islam.
Christoph Luxenberg, a scholar
of ancient Semitic languages in Germany, argues that the Koran has been misread
and mistranslated for centuries. His work, based on the earliest copies of the
Koran, maintains that parts of Islam's holy book are derived from pre-existing
Christian Aramaic texts that were misinterpreted by later Islamic scholars who
prepared the editions of the Koran commonly read today.
So, for example, the virgins who
are supposedly awaiting good Islamic martyrs as their reward in paradise are in
reality ''white raisins'' of crystal clarity rather than fair maidens.
Christoph Luxenberg, however, is
a pseudonym, and his scholarly tome ''''The Syro-Aramaic Reading of the Koran''
had trouble finding a publisher, although it is considered a major new work by
several leading scholars in the field. Verlag Das Arabische Buch in Berlin
ultimately published the book.
The caution is not surprising.
Salman Rushdie's ''Satanic Verses'' received a fatwa because it appeared to
mock Muhammad. The Egyptian novelist Naguib Mahfouz was stabbed because one of
his books was thought to be irreligious. And when the Arab scholar Suliman
Bashear argued that Islam developed as a religion gradually rather than
emerging fully formed from the mouth of the Prophet, he was injured after being
thrown from a second-story window by his students at the University of Nablus
in the West Bank.
Damien Mackey’s comment: I stand with those who do not accept that there actually was an
historical Prophet Mohammed of the C7th AD. See e.g. my multi-part series:
Further argument for
Prophet Mohammed's likely non-existence
commencing with:
In my opinion ‘Mohammed’ is, to a great extent, a
biblical composite, based on the likes of Moses; Jephthah; David; Jeremiah;
John the Baptist: and Jesus Christ.
Alexander Stille continues:
Even many broad-minded liberal
Muslims become upset when the historical veracity and authenticity of the Koran
is questioned.
The reverberations have affected
non-Muslim scholars in Western countries. ''Between fear and political
correctness, it's not possible to say anything other than sugary nonsense about
Islam,'' said one scholar at an American university who asked not to be named,
referring to the threatened violence as well as the widespread reluctance on
United States college campuses to criticize other cultures.
…. ''The Muslims have the
benefit of hindsight of the European experience, and they know very well that
once you start questioning the holy scriptures, you don't know where it will
stop,'' the scholar explained.
The touchiness about questioning
the Koran predates the latest rise of Islamic militancy. As long ago as 1977,
John Wansbrough of the School of Oriental and African Studies in London wrote
that subjecting the Koran to ''analysis by the instruments and techniques of
biblical criticism is virtually unknown.''
Mr. Wansbrough insisted that the
text of the Koran appeared to be a composite of different voices or texts
compiled over dozens if not hundreds of years. After all, scholars agree that
there is no evidence of the Koran until 691 -- 59 years after Muhammad's death [sic]
-- when the Dome of the Rock mosque in Jerusalem was built [sic], carrying
several Koranic inscriptions.
These inscriptions differ to
some degree from the version of the Koran that has been handed down through the
centuries, suggesting, scholars say, that the Koran may have still been
evolving in the last decade of the seventh century. Moreover, much of what we
know as Islam -- the lives and sayings of the Prophet -- is based on texts from
between 130 and 300 years after Muhammad's death.
In 1977 two other scholars from
the School for Oriental and African Studies at London University -- Patricia
Crone (a professor of history at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton)
and Michael Cook (a professor of Near Eastern history at Princeton University)
-- suggested a radically new approach in their book ''Hagarism: The Making of
the Islamic World.''
Since there are no Arabic
chronicles from the first century of Islam, the two looked at several
non-Muslim, seventh-century accounts that suggested Muhammad was perceived not
as the founder of a new religion but as a preacher in the Old Testament
tradition, hailing the coming of a Messiah. Many of the early documents refer
to the followers of Muhammad as ''hagarenes,'' and the ''tribe of Ishmael,'' in
other words as descendants of Hagar, the servant girl that the Jewish patriarch
Abraham used to father his son Ishmael.
In its earliest form, Ms. Crone
and Mr. Cook argued, the followers of Muhammad may have seen themselves as
retaking their place in the Holy Land alongside their Jewish cousins. (And many
Jews appear to have welcomed the Arabs as liberators when they entered
Jerusalem in 638.)
The idea that Jewish messianism
animated the early followers of the Prophet is not widely accepted in the
field, but ''Hagarism'' is credited with opening up the field. ''Crone and Cook
came up with some very interesting revisionist ideas,'' says Fred M. Donner of
the University of Chicago and author of the recent book ''Narratives of Islamic
Origins: The Beginnings of Islamic Historical Writing.'' ''I think in trying to
reconstruct what happened, they went off the deep end, but they were asking the
right questions.''
The revisionist school of early
Islam has quietly picked up momentum in the last few years as historians began
to apply rational standards of proof to this material.
Mr. Cook and Ms. Crone have revised
some of their early hypotheses while sticking to others. ''We were certainly
wrong about quite a lot of things,'' Ms. Crone said. ''But I stick to the basic
point we made: that Islamic history did not arise as the classic tradition says
it does.''
Ms. Crone insists that the Koran
and the Islamic tradition present a fundamental paradox. The Koran is a text
soaked in monotheistic thinking, filled with stories and references to Abraham,
Isaac, Joseph and Jesus, and yet the official history insists that Muhammad, an
illiterate camel merchant, received the revelation in Mecca, a remote, sparsely
populated part of Arabia, far from the centers of monotheistic thought, in an
environment of idol-worshiping Arab Bedouins. Unless one accepts the idea of
the angel Gabriel, Ms. Crone says, historians must somehow explain how all
these monotheistic stories and ideas found their way into the Koran.
''There are only two
possibilities,'' Ms. Crone said. ''Either there had to be substantial numbers
of Jews and Christians in Mecca or the Koran had to have been composed
somewhere else.''
Indeed, many scholars who are
not revisionists agree that Islam must be placed back into the wider historical
context of the religions of the Middle East rather than seeing it as the
spontaneous product of the pristine Arabian desert. ''I think there is
increasing acceptance, even on the part of many Muslims, that Islam emerged out
of the wider monotheistic soup of the Middle East,'' says Roy Mottahedeh, a
professor of Islamic history at Harvard University.
Scholars like Mr. Luxenberg and
Gerd-R. Puin, who teaches at Saarland University in Germany, have returned to
the earliest known copies of the Koran in order to grasp what it says about the
document's origins and composition. Mr. Luxenberg explains these copies are
written without vowels and diacritical dots that modern Arabic uses to make it
clear what letter is intended. In the eighth and ninth centuries, more than a
century after the death of Muhammad, Islamic commentators added diacritical
marks to clear up the ambiguities of the text, giving precise meanings to
passages based on what they considered to be their proper context. Mr.
Luxenberg's radical theory is that many of the text's difficulties can be
clarified when it is seen as closely related to Aramaic, the language group of
most Middle Eastern Jews and Christians at the time.
For example, the famous passage
about the virgins is based on the word hur, which is an adjective in the
feminine plural meaning simply ''white.'' Islamic tradition insists the term
hur stands for ''houri,'' which means virgin, but Mr. Luxenberg insists that
this is a forced misreading of the text. In both ancient Aramaic and in at
least one respected dictionary of early Arabic, hur means ''white raisin.''
Mr. Luxenberg has traced the
passages dealing with paradise to a Christian text called Hymns of Paradise by
a fourth-century author. Mr. Luxenberg said the word paradise was derived from
the Aramaic word for garden and all the descriptions of paradise described it
as a garden of flowing waters, abundant fruits and white raisins, a prized
delicacy in the ancient Near East.
In this context, white raisins,
mentioned often as hur, Mr. Luxenberg said, makes more sense than a reward of
sexual favors.
In many cases, the differences
can be quite significant. Mr. Puin points out that in the early archaic copies
of the Koran, it is impossible to distinguish between the words ''to fight''
and ''to kill.'' In many cases, he said, Islamic exegetes added diacritical marks
that yielded the harsher meaning, perhaps reflecting a period in which the
Islamic Empire was often at war.
A return to the earliest Koran,
Mr. Puin and others suggest, might lead to a more tolerant brand of Islam, as
well as one that is more conscious of its close ties to both Judaism and
Christianity.
''It is serious and exciting
work,'' Ms. Crone said of Mr. Luxenberg's work. Jane McAuliffe, a professor of
Islamic studies at Georgetown University, has asked Mr. Luxenberg to contribute
an essay to the Encyclopedia of the Koran, which she is editing.
Mr. Puin would love to see a
''critical edition'' of the Koran produced, one based on recent philological
work, but, he says, ''the word critical is misunderstood in the Islamic world
-- it is seen as criticizing or attacking the text.''
Some Muslim authors have begun
to publish skeptical, revisionist work on the Koran as well. Several new
volumes of revisionist scholarship, ''The Origins of the Koran,'' and ''The
Quest for the Historical Muhammad,'' have been edited by a former Muslim who
writes under the pen name Ibn Warraq. Mr. Warraq, who heads a group called the
Institute for the Secularization of Islamic Society, makes no bones about
having a political agenda. ''Biblical scholarship has made people less
dogmatic, more open,'' he said, ''and I hope that happens to Muslim society as
well.''
But many Muslims find the tone
and claims of revisionism offensive. ''I think the broader implications of some
of the revisionist scholarship is to say that the Koran is not an authentic
book, that it was fabricated 150 years later,'' says Ebrahim Moosa, a professor
of religious studies at Duke University, as well as a Muslim cleric whose
liberal theological leanings earned him the animosity of fundamentalists in South
Africa, which he left after his house was firebombed.
Andrew Rippin, an Islamicist at
the University of Victoria in British Columbia, Canada, says that freedom of
speech in the Islamic world is more likely to evolve from within the Islamic
interpretative tradition than from outside attacks on it. Approaches to the
Koran that are now branded as heretical -- interpreting the text metaphorically
rather than literally -- were widely practiced in mainstream Islam a thousand
years ago.
''When I teach the history of
the interpretation it is eye-opening to students the amount of independent
thought and diversity of interpretation that existed in the early centuries of
Islam,'' Mr. Rippin says. ''It was only in more recent centuries that there was
a need for limiting interpretation.''
