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Posted by: igor at January 17, 2006 5:27 AM

Unfortunately, there can be immense pressures applied in academia, as you know, against dissenters from a party line. So Pat Crone and Michael Cook have disavowed their book, Hagarism. I read the first two chapters at the National Library in Jerusalem but have not had time to get to the rest. I'd like to get a used or reprint copy, but as you say it has not been reprinted. And it is unlikely to be reprinted since Cook and Crone have recanted.

As to the Dome of the Rock, it covers a large rock embedded in the ground that Jews had earlier identified as the Foundation Stone of the world [Even haShetiyyah]. The present structure is built in an octagonal shape, which seems to imitate that of a Byzantine church located between Bethlehem and Jerusalem, called the Kathisma. This church's location was long unknown, however, Israeli archeologists have dug up the remains in the past few years. It was/is near the Cremisan and/or Mar Elias monasteries south of Ramat Rahel. Hence, it seems that eventhough the Umayyad caliph commissioned its building, the plan and the work may have been done by local Christians following the plan of the Kathisma. As I recall what Moshe Gil wrote about the Temple Mount in the early Muslim period [Umayyad], Jews could pray on the Mount in that early time. Further, up to the Fatimid period at least, Jews used as a synagogue an ancient [Second Temple] entrance to the Mount from the Valley ["Tyropoeon Valley"] street which led to steps inside the Mount up to the surface.
Two reasons are usually given for building the Dome of the Rock: 1) to create an alternate focus for Muslim pilgrimage since Mecca and Medina were controlled by a rival Muslim-Arab dynasty [circa 680], 2) to outshine the Christian church of the Holy Sepulcher. Anti-Christian verses of the Quran are supposedly written inside the dome high above ground level.

It is indeed curious as to why critical thinking is suspended among Western so-called "leftists" whenever Islam is considere.

Posted by: Eliyahu at January 17, 2006 6:47 AM

that should be:
"whenever Islam is considered"

Posted by: Eliyahu at January 17, 2006 6:49 AM

There was a case 4 or 5 years ago of an incredibly ancient Quran discovered at a construction site in Yemen or perhaps southern Saudi Arabia. As I recall, a German expert was brought in to either study the text or chemically treat the paper in order to preserve it. While doing so, he secretly photocopied much of it.

His findings were supposed to be revolutionary. I've heard nothing about it since. Is anyone familiar with this story?

Posted by: Cornelius at January 17, 2006 8:33 AM

"It is indeed curious as to why critical thinking is suspended among Western so-called "leftists" whenever Islam is considered."

It's called multiculturalism.

Posted by: Cornelius at January 17, 2006 8:34 AM

"Pat Crone"? Patricia Crone, at the Institute for Advanced Study, as far as I know has not given anyone permission to call her "Pat." Certainly not to those who do not know her. What's next? Benny Franklin? Frankie Roosevelt?

Decorum, in words, please.

Posted by: Hugh at January 17, 2006 8:40 AM

"If you are a Muslim, you believe that Muhammad made his 'Night Journey,' or Miraj, from the top of what non-Muslims know as the Temple Mount."

Any francophone bloggers here who might know the provenance of the word "mirage", as in seeing an imaginary oasis in the middle of a desert?

Posted by: waterdragon52 at January 17, 2006 8:49 AM

http://www.bibleprobe.com/corruptedquran.htm

Posted by: JanuaryMan at January 17, 2006 8:51 AM

cornelius
Originally published in the Atlantic

What is the Koran

Posted by: jrdroll at January 17, 2006 8:58 AM

Elijahu... I tried to buy a copy but baulked at the the ~700$US cost and now it is unobtainable as far as I know.

Anyone want to put a copy online (sorry about copyright but...)

As for them recanting, I wonder just how much was due to recent scholarship and how much due to promises about their immediate future. Many people only see clearly at the point of a gun.

Posted by: Zathras at January 17, 2006 9:14 AM

Read the forthcoming "Which Koran?" by Ibn Warraq for more on this. And as for the failure to reprint "Hagarism" -- there may be a slight difference between Cook and Crone in this matter. The former seems to exhibit more solicitude for Muslim sensibilities. But just look at how cleverly Cook handled things in his "A Very Short Guide to the Koran."

That "Short Guide" appeared, by the way, in the same series as Malise Ruthven's deplorable "A Very Short Guide to Islam." Some short guides are good, and some not so good -- as Sir Edmund Hillary might have said, as he sized up his Sherpas.

Posted by: Hugh at January 17, 2006 9:16 AM

"Anti-Christian verses of the Quran are supposedly written inside the dome high above ground level."

I believe anti-Christian verses -- including "God has no Son" -- brazenly adorn the external walls.

Posted by: Dr. Pepper at January 17, 2006 11:03 AM

If one accepts the arguments, philologically-grounded, of Christoph Luxenberg about the inscriptions at the Dome of the Rock, then one concludes that the Arabic writing high up on the walls inside the Dome, is neither Qur'anic nor Islamic, and certainly not anti-Christian -- but rather, Christian.

Discussion of the Luxenberg article from those capable of accepting, rejecting, or accepting in part, its thesis, has not even begun.

It will take time. Luxenberg's text is in German. But German, which used to be required for all doctoral candidates, is no longer known by professors, even professors specializing in the history of early Islam.

Posted by: Hugh at January 17, 2006 11:30 AM

Let's just hope Harvard uses its new $20 million windfall to hire serious scholars who are willing to set 'muslim sensibilities' aside in their quest for truth. Yeah, right. That's the ticket.

Posted by: Infidel33 at January 17, 2006 1:04 PM

"Harvard uses its new $20 million windfall to hire serious scholars who are willing to set 'muslim sensibilities' aside in their quest for truth..."

Roy Mottahedeh (the "rebbe" for Noah Feldman"), Roger Owen, former lecturer at St. Antony's miraculously anointed to be the successor to -- as J. B. Kelly called him -- that total fake A. J. Meyer, after whom some chair in Middle Eastern economics was named, and the rest of them? Not to mention, bringing up the Spiritual Search rear, Diane Eck and Leila Ahmad at the Divinity School. Don't be silly. Defenders of the Faith, even Mottahedeh with his talented mother and that Benchley quote I keep mentioning, just to show how fair I can be. And according to several students at Harvard studying Arabic, the languge teachers are particuarly religious, and therefore particularly sinister. On the matter of Arabic language teaching, see the essay by a Maronite Arabic-speaker who taught at the MIddlebury Summer School -- an essay that should be circulated to all those put in charge of distribtuing Americna taxpayers's money for the teaching of Arabic, Farsi, and similar languages. No need to employ those who use their language classes as places for subtle, or not-so-subtle, indoctrination of unwary students.

Posted by: Hugh at January 17, 2006 1:20 PM

Hugh...bursting bubbles with facts again.

Dr Pepper: I believe anti-Christian verses -- including "God has no Son" -- brazenly adorn the external walls.

They tell us it's all the same God, and then say God has no son.If thats the case, who was the only begotten son that God said he was proud of? This is either two different gods or the one God is confused. Somehow I dont think God as we understand it(maybe) is confused. But I do think muslims are confused. It comes with being in contact with Allah...the 'other' god. The one who lacks a son. Or a sun, depending on how you think about it. Islam has no heart to light up...lack of a son/sun keeps muslims in the dark.
They are like drunks in a dark room full of empty carboard boxes trying to find the lightswitch, only to find the electricity has been cut off for non payment. Can you imagine how frustrating that must be...no son, no sun...Thats hell, and you know who the chief cook and bottle washer is there.
Your sevice has been terminated only apostacy can restore the light. There may be only one God, but its name is not Allah...

Posted by: duh_swami at January 17, 2006 2:23 PM

Everything in Islam is a big lie. The Miraj is one of the biggest cons perpetrated on the gullible.
Like every thing else in Islam borrowed from the Jews and Christians (where they got it all wrong). The Miraj too is in the minds of the Umayyed Caliphs who captured Jerusalem - a created fantasy. The quran does not mention in any chapter or verse the word Jerusalem. No historical record says that Abraham was in Arabia except in todays Syria and Iraq. Abraham never built a house in Mecca but the stupid idiots go running there and believe all that. Islam itself is a self perpetuating load of lies.

Posted by: faqi at January 17, 2006 2:56 PM

A student in the course on "Islam" given at Harvard several years ago had a few short-essay answers on the final exam. One question was: Define "Miraj." He answered that it was "according to Muslim belief" the "Miraj" is the name of Muhammad's Night Journey, to the seventh heaven, on his winged steed al-Buraq, and so on." The Muslim grader, however, gave him a "D" on that question (and from then on was none too favorably disposed) and wrote beside that answer "So you think it is just a belief that Muslims have?"

The student graduated soon after. But he saved the bluebook. He was disgusted at the time, and wished to do nothing. But he saved the bluebook, and the grader's comment. He may yet bring charges against that grader, and may yet expose the whole course, what was taught and what was not.

These people will not get away with this kidn of thing permanently. Too many records are being kept, of blue books and papers, of syllabi and reading lists. Too much has been omitted, too many skewed presentations offered. Not all students remain fools, and some of them bother to educate themselves, either during the course, or after. And eventually evidence of continuous educational malpractice will be brought forward. Department heads, college presidents, and others should begin to monitor these courses, and exhibit less indifference or nearly criminal negligence, in this particular area, where the need for truthful instruction is desperate, and so far indulgence of the other kind has been so dismaying and so dangerous.

When there is a clear pattern of educational malpractice, even tenure should not protect someone. In fact, tenure is coming -- and should, for other reasons -- to the end of its rope.

Posted by: Hugh at January 17, 2006 3:29 PM

"A student in the course on "Islam" given at Harvard several years ago had a few short-essay answers on the final exam. One question was: Define "Miraj." He answered that it was "according to Muslim belief" the "Miraj" is the name of Muhammad's Night Journey, to the seventh heaven, on his winged steed al-Buraq, and so on." The Muslim grader, however, gave him a "D" on that question (and from then on was none too favorably disposed) and wrote beside that answer "So you think it is just a belief that Muslims have?"

-posted by Hugh

That is horrifying. So not only are infidels expected to believe that Muslims discovered America and other historical fabrications but we have to believe that Muhammad travelled to the seven heavens on the back of a flying donkey with the head of a woman? The grader no doubt felt embarrassed that an educated infidel would scoff at such a belief and took umbrage that the belief itself was so silly that only a Muslim could believe it. Well the truth hurts, doesn't it?

Posted by: igor at January 17, 2006 3:44 PM

In response to the views of the Pope first published by Spengler, Daniel Pipes has an essay on the subject.

The Pope and the Koran

http://www.danielpipes.org/article/3281

In response to Daniel Pipes, I would recommend a letter from commentator Howlin

http://www.danielpipes.org/comments/31825

Mush of what Howlin writes is well known at JW/DW, however the way it is put is well worth reading and archiving.

Posted by: DP111 at January 17, 2006 3:55 PM

as to whether Crone and Cook recanted on account of new info and research, or on account of pressure, I strongly that the recanting was on account of pressure. The UK university world seems to be very very pro-Islamic, although no doubt not universally so. I trace this back to the influence of arnold toynbee and his royal institute of international affairs [RIIA]. Marjorie Housepian pointed to his book in the early 1920s, The Western Question in Turkey.

Posted by: Eliyahu at January 17, 2006 4:30 PM

As someone who's more or less professionally involved in orientalism, I have a few comments or questions about some of the statements in this article. Before I get into that, though, I'd like to make very clear that I'm not speaking out of an ideological opposition to anything here as such, but rather to maybe give the perspective on a couple of things from an academic point of view.
But about Christoph Luxenburg: Have any of you who describe his work as "philologically well-grounded" and "implacable" actually read his work and have enough knowledge of Syriac and Arabic and the requisite philological training to make that assessment? Although I can understand enthousiasm for more textual criticism being done on the Qur'an, the analogy to biblical criticism is telling. That is, how much of what gets sold as biblical criticism is valuable and how much (especially if we look at studies of the "historical Jesus") is the methodologically baseless work of amateur scholars? As promising as the Syro-Aramaeische Lesart des Qurans sounds in summary, I can tell you that at the very best it's comparable to Peshitta primicism in New Testament studies.
As for Luxenburg's identity, it is widely known at least among those who cared enough to find it out. As it turned out, he is a Syrian living in Germany whose only academic training is in mechanical engineering. It appears in the end that his use of a pseudonym was much more in order to hide his lack of academic credentials and to generate publicity than to escape some kind or retribution.
I heard him speak in a semi-private gathering about two years ago and, although I am usually very enthousiastic about critical philological treatments of the Qur'an, I must say that I left extremely dissapointed; although it seemed that he speaks modern Arabic natively and probably learned some Syriac as a boy in Sunday school, that and enthousiastic dictionary-work seem to be the only basis for his work.
The usual academic response to his work now I think has more to do with the fact that such poor scholarship was able to generate so much press (outside of German-speaking countries) and the resulting embarassment caused to the field in the public view than anything else. The general feeling about this is that this embarassment will stigmatize and discourage research along these lines in the future.

Posted by: the_dionysus_monkey at January 17, 2006 4:46 PM

the_dionysus_monkey,

Thank you for sharing. I agree with you that much of biblical criticism is not that original and there have been many amateurish books published on the subject such as "Rabbi Jesus", but nevertheless I do think that biblical criticism and even the quest for the historical Jesus are worthwhile studies and they have helped us understand the history of Christianity and Judaism far better than before. I see no harm in applying the same methods to the Qur'an and the history of early Islam (they have been applied to Hinduism and Buddhism afterall), but again, we should be very cautious of the quality of the work.

I have a several questions regarding Luxenburg for you. Does he have no academic training in Arabic philiology, Syraic, or Islam at all? Could it be possible that he is self-taught and not just using dictionaries and concordances here and there? Why did you find his speech unimpressive? How much support does he have in Germany if his academic credentials are suspect? Have any other respectable Orientalist linguists offerred critiques of his work in German that you are aware of? Although you are initally disappointed with his work, do you still think it has some merit and why? Also, please do not reveal any more personal information about him on this site. We get lots of hits and there are many lurkers here who are Muslim who might want to locate Luxenburg.

I hope you stick around here. This is a very interesting site. Also, one last question...have you read any of Ibn Warraq's works on Early Islam and if so what do you think of them? Amateurish? Professional? Flawed? Excellent?

Posted by: igor at January 17, 2006 5:54 PM

Thanks jr...fascinating stuff. It's fascinating to contemplate the extent to which the Quran has been bastardized through the years via translation. One wonders if these findings will ever be made available to the world...and if so, how it will impact the ummah in matters of interpretation and ultimately, fidelity to the faith.

Posted by: Cornelius at January 17, 2006 6:12 PM

"As for Luxenburg's identity, it is widely known at least among those who cared enough to find it out. As it turned out, he is a Syrian living in Germany whose only academic training is in mechanical engineering."
-- from a posting above

This, and everything in the posting from which it is taken, is absolute nonsense and lies, from first to last. Luxenberg is not a mechanical engineer, but taught Syriac, considered as the form of Aramaic spoken in Edessa (see Ibn Warraq's "What the Koran Really Says," the appendix with the chart about languages). His doctorate was on Syriac manuscripts -- i.e. manuscripts in the Aramaic of Edessa. He is in addition completely at home in Arabic at every level: classical Arabic, colloquial Arabic, the spoken Arabic of Lebanon, of Syria, and of Egypt. He is perfectly at home with philological analyses -- grammatical, syntactical -- of Semitic languages in general.

More, tomorrow.

Posted by: Hugh at January 17, 2006 9:32 PM

Eliyahu

I have heard some Christian scholars who live in Jerusalem speculate that the Dome of the Rock may not be the exact site of Solomon’s Temple, but rather the Dome sits in the outer court yard area of the original Temple.

Could you imagine the Dome was NOT on top of the Temple itself?? What a spin that would put the Muslims into! Especially if a different site was identified! I have heard that the Wall is part of the Temple grounds, as is the area of the Dome of the Rock, but that the actual Temple, and the "Holy of Holies" may be somewhere else in the area. That these sites merely lie in the "outer" court area of the original Temple. Do you know anything about this?? Heard anything about it??

I have heard from Christians (face to face) who do a lot of charity work in Israel, that in the Muslim controlled areas of Israel, (including the “West Bank) that whenever Jewish artefacts are found, they go “missing” in order to "prove" that the Jews never really exited there

Islam = One big lie!

Posted by: 3rdtimelucky at January 17, 2006 9:59 PM

Hugh,

Isn's Luxenberg the one who DW carried a story containing something of the sort "I'm scared...I'll have to continue my research in private" and his Muslim students supposedly encouraging him to go forward with his research?

Tushar

Posted by: Tushar Saxena at January 17, 2006 9:59 PM

Pirates always claim to have the right to their booty.

Mohammad got Allah to give him a special dispensation for forcing his stepson to divorce so he could steal his wife and marry her himself.

A handpuppet 'God' in the mitt of a warlord.

And what kind of religion would you get?

Posted by: profitsbeard at January 17, 2006 10:19 PM

To Tushar above -- No. That's not Luxenberg, and I don't know whom you are thinking of.

Posted by: Hugh at January 17, 2006 10:46 PM

Hugh...thank you for castrating the monkey before he could tear up any more loaves of bread.

Unfortunately we have no similar allusions to Muhammad as Muslims are too browbeaten and thinskinned to countenance any criticism of their bloodthirsty despot of a prophet and any chink in the Islamic armour of untruth could let in the light of day and we all know what both light and truth would do to Muhammad (nosferatu anyone?)

I have to admit to immediate suspicion when i read that Luxenburg was an linguistically ignorant Syrian living in Germany. (Mind you , ideal from an islamic POV)

There is no way that anyone born and bred a Muslim would have the courage or even the unbiased intelligence to say openly that the Yemeni mosque fragments disagree with the current "word of God". That is unless he was an apostate with an axe to grind.

Now knowing that he is not a Muslim gives us a chance to hope for a future unbiased and academically sustainable analysis of the fragments.

As for why muslims are appalled by this it isn't hard to work out as any contradictions( white raisins and virgins) undermines the first tenet of islam and shows support for the truths of hagarism. I can just imagine the fatwas flying around. It is a miracle that a westerner was ever allowed to get his hands on the fragments and this was made me so sceptical about it all when i first heard of it. How on earth could they have been this stupid? Or are they forgeries?
It all seems a little too good to be true to myself.

Posted by: Zathras at January 17, 2006 10:49 PM

"Isn's Luxenberg the one who DW carried a story containing something of the sort "I'm scared...I'll have to continue my research in private" and his Muslim students supposedly encouraging him to go forward with his research?"

It was the opposite; Luxenberg wasn't terribly concerned about his safety, but his Turkish friends warned him to be more careful and so he took up a pseudonym.

Posted by: Dr. Pepper at January 17, 2006 10:58 PM

the Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem

Outer Face: West and North-West Walls:

"In the name of God the Merciful and Compassionate. There is no God but God alone. Praise be to God who hath not taken to himself offspring. To Him there has never been any person in the sovereignty. Mohammed is the messenger of God, may God pray upon Him and accept his intercession.

"Praise be God who has not taken unto himself a son and who has no partner in sovereignty nor has He any protector on account of weakness."

http://www.jews-for-allah.org/Why-Believe-in-Allah/Temple-Mount-restored-by-Muhammad.htm

Posted by: Dr. Pepper at January 17, 2006 11:07 PM

I only have to say one thing:

End the Palestinian occupation of Jewish lands

Posted by: x_achillesheel_x at January 17, 2006 11:52 PM

"the Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem

Outer Face: West and North-West Walls"
-- from a posting above

Luxenberg writes about the inscriptions on the inside walls of the Dome of the Rock, not about the inscriptions on the outside walls of the Al-Aksa Mosque.

Posted by: Hugh at January 18, 2006 12:23 AM

Hugh,
So, I wrote off the top of my head without looking up to make absolutely sure I was right and I did make a pretty bad mistake. I apologize. The information about Luxenburg having only a mechanical engineering degree is wrong; this was the information that I was told by the person who introduced me to him. Rather, although he did not start out as an academic, he does apparently have a doctorate from Ruprecht-Karl-Universität in Heidelburg. His dissertation, which, as you said, was about a certain collection Syriac manuscripts, judging from the title. If anyone wants to make an issue of it I can go take a look at it tomorrow. However, I will say that this is exactly the type of dissertation that one writes if one is avoiding any kind of philological heavy lifting. It was published twenty-some years ago and he has no publications since. That is, no publications under his own name and listed in the Index Islamicus- which would cover anything touching on early Islam or Arabic language, in my university library's catelogue, or that could be found with Google. Again, if anyone wants to make further issue of it, I'll go check Brock's exhaustive list of articles published on Syriac. That he was not employed in a teaching or research position (although he was working at a university) at the time of the Lesart's publication I don't think will be disputed. I'm not sure what else I can get away with saying to show that I know what I'm talking about without making his identity too obvious.
That said- and again my apologies for the incorrect info- what I said above about the quality of the work and its general reception in academia stands. I can't remember exactly all the reasons I was so dissapointed when I heard him speak, but one of his arguments stuck out in my mind as reflecting the flaws in his approach:
So, the discussion was about the original text of the Qur'an, in terms of how it was written. Luxenburg argued that because hamza (the glottal stop) was not written in the earliest Arabic scripts (really it very rarely shows up in manuscripts from any period), and because it does not exist in Syriac (not exactly true- cf. sha''el "he asked"- but more or less right) then the sound hamza did not exist in the Arabic of the Qur'an. Now, I won't go on and on about why this can't be, but my point is that this is an example of, among other things, a reliance on Syriac in a situation where there's no real justification for relying on Syriac.
Now, I want to make a point of saying again that the reason I want to point out criticism of Luxenburg is that the whole to-do surrounding him- that is, someone with little qualification coming out with a book that makes huge claims and generates a lot of publicity only to have these claims fall short under scholarly scrutiny, is in every way how not to go about a serious critical study of the Qur'an. In fact, the whole affair will discourage more serious research in this vein for quite some time.

Posted by: the_dionysus_monkey at January 18, 2006 1:42 AM

Hello all,

The Miraj was made so that Muhammed (pubh) could meet up with Allah (swt) at the office to discuss business.

You have to realise that even here a lot of "horse trading" needed to be had. Allah, needed to be worshipped with Muhammed his messenger...doing his bidding on earth.

I mean, what about the people who had no connection to Allah...how do they know what is appropriate for Allah's favour.

Indeed on the way up Muhd met up with other prophets...Moses and Jesus who had spent time on earth before and knew (possibly of the excesses) of Allah.....and so he got advice...good advice.

Allah first told his messenger...Make sure that I get prayed to 50 times a day and was advised against this by fellow prophets..."nah that's too much Muhd (pubh)....when will the people do their chores...what if they are having sensitive sales negotations...almost ready to close a sale....and wham...loudspeaker call to prayer....sale's off
I mean it's not practical".

So..."tooing and frowing" Allah agreed (with Muhd) to a practical 5 times a day ....people can still do their thing....chill....AND have time for prayer...cool or what.

Allah is most merciful & practical...did the Miraj happen ....You Betcha.

Posted by: Naseem at January 18, 2006 5:32 AM

Luxenburg argued that because hamza (the glottal stop) was not written in the earliest Arabic scripts (really it very rarely shows up in manuscripts from any period), and because it does not exist in Syriac (not exactly true- cf. sha''el "he asked"- but more or less right) then the sound hamza did not exist in the Arabic of the Qur'an. Now, I won't go on and on about why this can't be, but my point is that this is an example of, among other things, a reliance on Syriac in a situation where there's no real justification for relying on Syriac.

I'm not sure what you mean here. Just to clarify, are you saying that the absence of a sign marking the glottal stop is just an orthographical matter, rather than an indication of the influence of Syriac, which did not (apparently) use a glottal stop? Couldn't the Syriac words have been "borrowed" before the glottal stop was used (and later written?) in the dialect in question?

Anyway, I will never look at Abu Hamza (Captain Hook) in the same way. He certainly lives up to his name, using as many glottal stops as a Cockney sparrer, but without the latter's quick wit.

The Miraj was made so that Muhammed (pubh)

"Pubh"? Nice one. I'll look out for him down my local. Naseem, you're too obvious. Try to be more consistent in your mistakes if you want to carry on fooling the Amrikans.

Posted by: Interested at January 18, 2006 6:35 AM

Pubh - that will be the place where one imbibes a nice glo**le of geer I assume?

Posted by: Granny Weatherwax at January 18, 2006 6:56 AM

Yes, a glo**le of geer to wash down you chip bu**y. Add ketchup - shake the bo**le, shake the bo**le, none'll come and then a lo**ll.

Posted by: Interested at January 18, 2006 7:25 AM

Indeed on the way up Muhd met up with other prophets...Moses and Jesus who had spent time on earth before and knew (possibly of the excesses) of Allah.....and so he got advice...good advice.

Allah first told his messenger...Make sure that I get prayed to 50 times a day and was advised against this by fellow prophets..."nah that's too much Muhd (pubh)....when will the people do their chores...what if they are having sensitive sales negotations...almost ready to close a sale....and wham...loudspeaker call to prayer....sale's off
I mean it's not practical".

So..."tooing and frowing" Allah agreed (with Muhd) to a practical 5 times a day ....people can still do their thing....chill....AND have time for prayer...cool or what.

Allah is most merciful & practical...did the Miraj happen ....You Betcha.

Posted by: Naseem at January 18, 2006 05:32 AM

Wow, Naseem. That's really compelling evidence, isn't it.

So, who were the witnesses to "Muhd's" ascent to heaven, or was he enscribing the account in the Qu'ran as he ascended? What makes 5 times a day appropriate (Muslim practice) and 3 times a day inadequate (Jewish practice)? Or consuming shellfish but abstaining from pork (Muslim practice) as opposed to abstaining from both (Jewish practice). Only a meglomaniac's desire to distinguish himself from the competition, I'd suggest.

Posted by: waterdragon52 at January 18, 2006 7:53 AM

The famous "night journey" points up another problem with Islam and that is that what little theology and cosmology Islam contains, is laughably childish and medieval (familiar to any one who has read Dante, though not at all as advanced). That is why any conversation or dissertation on Islam goes immediately into historical/cultural territory skipping right over what to all other religions is the crux of the biscuit, namely their metaphysical and theological thought.

I'm really looking forward to the next great Ibn Warraq book. In the immortal words of Wayne's World, "we're not worthy..we're not worthy..."

Posted by: Rebecca JW at January 18, 2006 9:08 AM

Before I get down to the work of answering this "dionysus-monkey" in detail, those who may believe his nonsense about Luxenberg not being taken seriously -- when in fact even those who were initially skeptical (see the review by Hopkins in the JSAI (Jerusalem Studies of Arabic and Islam), and see what Hopkins now thinks of Luxenberg's work -- should start with this review in the most important journal of Syriac studies in the English-speaking world: Hugoye.

Here it is, in full:

HUGOYE: JOURNAL OF SYRIAC STUDIES

BOOK REVIEW

Christoph Luxenberg (ps.) Die syro-aramaeische Lesart des Koran; Ein Beitrag zur Entschlüsselung der Qur’ānsprache. Berlin, Germany: Das Arabische Buch, First Edition, 2000. Pp. ix + 306, bibliography on pp. 307-311, no index. Paperback, Euros 29.70, no price available in US Dollars. ISBN 3-86093-274-8.

Robert R. PHENIX Jr. and Cornelia B. HORN

University of St. Thomas
Department of Theology
John Roach Center 153
2115 Summit Avenue
St. Paul, MN 55107

[1] Not in the history of commentary on the Qur’ān has a work like this been produced. Similar works can only be found in the body of text-critical scholarship on the Bible. From its method to its conclusions on the language and content of the Qur’ān, Luxenberg’s study has freed scholars from the problematic tradition of the Islamic commentators. Whether or not Luxenberg is correct in every detail, with one book he has brought exegetical scholarship of the Qur’ān to the “critical turn” that biblical commentators took more than a century ago. This work demonstrates to all exegetes of the Qur'an the power of the scientific method of philology and its value in producing a clearer text of the Qur'an. Scholars of the first rank will now be forced to question the assumption that, from a philological perspective, the Islamic tradition is mostly reliable, as though it were immune to the human error that pervades the transmission of every written artifact. If biblical scholarship is any indication, the future of Qur’ānic studies is more or less decided by this work.

[2] The book presents the thesis, sources, method, and examples of its application in eighteen sections. Sections one through ten cover the background, method, and the application of that method to unlocking the etymology and meaning of the word Qur’ān,1 which Luxenberg argues is the key to understanding the text as a whole. Sections eleven through eighteen follow the conclusions set out in the first half by arguing solutions to several problematic expressions throughout the text. These include lexical, morphological and syntactic problems that illustrate the basic principles underlying the many errors in the transmission of the Qur’ān (11-14) and the extension of the method to examine problems that create misunderstandings of thematic material throughout the text (15-16). Luxenberg then applies his conclusions to an exegesis of suras 108 and 96. A synopsis of the work follows in section 18.

[3] Luxenberg aims to make available a selection of findings from an ongoing investigation into the language of the Qur’ān so that a preliminary discussion about methods of text linguistics as well as about the implications of the findings of such methods on the content of the Qur’ān might begin without waiting for the complete work. This work is only a sketch, developed with a heuristic and supported by extensive evidence. Luxenberg is aware that many features of a standard philological presentation are missing. These he promises in the final study.

[4] In the Foreword, Luxenberg summarizes the cultural and linguistic importance of written Syriac for the Arabs and for the Qur’ān. At the time of Muhammad, Arabic was not a written language. Syro-Aramaic or Syriac was the language of written communication in the Near East from the second to the seventh centuries A.D. Syriac, a dialect of Aramaic, was the language of Edessa, a city-state in upper Mesopotamia. While Edessa ceased to be a political entity, its language became the vehicle of Christianity and culture, spreading throughout Asia as far as Malabar and eastern China. Until the rise of the Qur’ān, Syriac was the medium of wider communication and cultural dissemination for Arameans, Arabs, and to a lesser extent Persians. It produced the richest literary expression in the Near East from the fourth century (Aphrahat and Ephraem) until it was replaced by Arabic in the seventh and eighth centuries. Of importance is that the Syriac – Aramaic literature and the cultural matrix in which that literature existed was almost exclusively Christian. Part of Luxenberg’s study shows that Syriac influence on those who created written Arabic was transmitted through a Christian medium, the influence of which was fundamental.

[5] Luxenberg then gives an etymology of the word “Syriac,” and notes that the language is mentioned with importance in the earliest hadīth literature which reports that Muhammad instructed his followers to know Syriac (as well as Hebrew). This can only be the case because these were the literary forerunners of written Arabic. Luxenberg conceived his study to test the following hypothesis: since written Syriac was the written language of the Arabs, and since it informed the cultural matrix of the Near East, much the same way that Akkadian did before it and Arabic after it, then it is very likely that Syriac exerted some influence on those who developed written Arabic. Luxenberg further proposes, that these Arabs were Christianized, and were participants in the Syriac Christian liturgy.

[6] Western scholars have since the nineteenth century been aware of the influence of foreign languages, particularly of the dialect of Aramaic called Syriac, on the vocabulary of the Qur’ān. Luxenberg assembles all of the pieces of this line of research into a systematic examination of the Arabic of the Qur’ān in order to provide a general solution to its many textual difficulties. The conclusions drawn about the source of the Qur’ān, its transmission history from Muhammad to cUthmān, and its thematic content rest on arguments drawn from evidence collected and examined through the tools of philological and text-critical methods. No part of the method rests on a blind acceptance of religious or traditional assumptions of any kind, especially with respect to the Arabian commentators. Until now, Western critical commentators of the first rank have not been critical enough in this regard and Luxenberg directly and indirectly through his conclusions proves that their trust was betrayed. Hence any argument that seeks to prove Luxenberg’s findings incorrect cannot assume that the earliest Arabian commentators understood correctly the grammar and lexicon of the Arabic of the Qur’ān. This is an important contribution of the study.

[7] Luxenberg then presents the Islamic tradition about the early transmission history of the Qur’ān. According to that tradition, khalifa cUthmān ibn cAffan (A.D. 644-656) first assembled into a single book the written record of the utterances of Muhammad (A.D. 570-632). The Qur’ān is the first book of the Arabic language of which scholars are aware. It is important because it is the basis for written Arabic, the language of a sophisticated Medieval civilization, and because for Muslims it is the source of all religious expression, theology, and law, and is held to be God’s revelation to Muhammad. For non-Muslims, it is an important literary artifact, and deserves to be studied from a historical as well as a philological perspective.

[8] It is the latter prespective that Luxenberg follows. Western commentators have followed Islamic tradition rather than used the reference tools and techniques of philological investigation. Luxenberg gives a brief description of the findings from important works on Qur’ānic philology in the West. Scholars have been increasingly aware of the presence in the Qur’ān of foreign terms and references to foreign historical events and that Aramaic dialects contributed most of these. However, because Western scholars maintained the technically outdated and unscientific approach of Islamic exegesis, the significance of these findings has had to wait until the present study.

[9] Section two is little more than a statement that Luxenberg’s study is independent of both Arabian as well as Western research precisely because his method does not rely on the explanations of the Arabian commentators, but rather on Arabic and Syriac lexical tools as well as comparative Semitic linguistics. His chief source among the Arabian commentators is the earliest commentary on the Qur’ān, that of Tabarī.2 Tabarī had no Arabic dictionary that he could consult, and so he had to rely on oral tradition and on commentators closer to the time of Muhammad whose lost works his citations in part preserve. The Lisān, the most extensive lexicon of the Arabic language,3 the Western translations and commentaries of Bell,4 Blachère,5 and Paret,6 the Syriac dictionaries of Payne Smith7 and Brockelmann,8 and the Vocabulaire Chaldéen – Arabique of Mannā9 are the other primary reference works.

[10] The use of these materials is placed in the service of the method in section three. Luxenberg states that the primary goal of the study was to clarify expressions that were unclear to the three Western commentators. The discovery of many Aramaisms led Luxenberg to check these in passages that were supposedly not contentious according to the Western exegetes. The examination of these passages was all the more justified when the explanations of the Arabian commentators (which the Western scholars largely followed) did not at all fit the context. For example, Tabarī did not have any lexicographical tools and only occasionally cites a verse from pre-Qur’ānic Arabic poetry as support for his interpretation of a given expression. In such cases the margin of error is wide because the context for these pre-Islamic poems is often difficult to ascertain. Even so, in many instances the Western commentators accept these explanations uncritically.

[11] Using his philological method Luxenberg attempts to establish the historical context for the Qur’ān in order to provide a systematic approach to solving text-critical problems. His base text is the canonical edition of the Qur’ān published in Cairo in 1923-24, taken without the vowel marks. The advantage of this edition over earlier ones is that it sought to base its readings on a comparison of earlier Arabic commentators. The most important feature of this work is that the redactors attempted to fix the diacritical points that distinguish between possible readings of a single letter. Luxenberg does in many cases emend these points, but does so following a clear and detailed method. When he has a clear choice between two variant readings, lectio difficilior prevails. Only when the context of an expression is manifestly unclear, and the Arabian commentators have no plausible explanation, does Luxenberg explore a solution that involves changing one or more diacritical points in the Cairene edition.

[12] Luxenberg clearly outlines the heuristic. Starting from those passages that are unclear to the Western commentators, the method runs as follows. First check if there is a plausible explanation in Tabarī that the Western commentators overlooked. If not, then check whether the Lisān records a meaning unknown to Tabarī and his earlier sources. If this turns up nothing, check if the Arabic expression has a homonymous root in Syriac with a different meaning which fits the context. In many cases, Luxenberg found that the Syriac word with its meaning makes more sense. It is to be noted, that these first steps of the heuristic do not emend the consonantal text of the Cairene edition of the Qur’ān.

[13] If these steps do not avail, then see if changing one or more diacritical marks results in an Arabic expression that makes more sense. Luxenberg found that many cases are shown to be misreadings of one consonant for another. If not, then change the diacritical point(s) and then check if there is a homonymous Syriac root with a plausible meaning.

[14] If there is still no solution, check if the Arabic is a calque of a Syriac expression. Calques are of two kinds: morphological and semantic. A morphological calque is a borrowing that preserves the structure of the source word but uses the morphemes of the target language. For example, German Fernsehen is just the morphemes tele and visio of English “television” translated into their German equivalents. A semantic calque assigns the borrowed meaning to a word that did not have the meaning previously, but which is otherwise synonymous with the source word.

[15] In section four, Luxenberg presents the development of the Arabic script and its central importance to the transmission history of the Qur’ān. He demonstrates that there were originally only six letters to distinguish some twenty-six sounds. The letters were gradually distinguished by points written above or below each letter. The Arabic alphabet used in the Qur’ān began as a shorthand, a mnemonic device not intended as a complete key to the sounds of the language. Luxenberg concludes that the transmission of the text from Muhammad was not likely an oral transmission by memory, contrary to one dominant claim of Islamic tradition.

[16] That tradition preserves different stories about the oral transmission of the Qur’ān and Luxenberg assembles these in section five. According to Islamic tradition, the Qur’ān was transmitted in part by an uninterrupted chain of "readers," Arabic qurrā’, contemporaries of Muhammad such as ibn cAbbas (d. 692) and maintained by such early authorities as Anas ibn Mālik (d. 709). Contradicting this is another tradition, that cUthmān obtained the "leaves" of the Qur’ān from Muhammad's widow Hafsa, and assembled them into a codex. The Islamic tradition is unable to pinpoint when the diacritical points were finally "fixed," a process that unfolded over three hundred years, according to Blachère. The reason for the difficulty in tracing the development of the Qur’ān before cUthmān is, as Tabarī points out, that cUthmān destroyed all manuscripts with variant readings of the consonantal text which disagreed with his final recension.

[17] In section six Luxenberg presents the Islamic tradition derived from Muhammad himself concerning the indeterminate nature of the Qur’ān's consonantal text, of which two stories are recorded by Tabarī. The gist of these is that Muhammad sanctioned any reading of the text that did not blatantly change a curse into a blessing or vice-versa. Luxenberg argues that these obviously later stories reflect what must be a faint recollection of the indeterminacy of the Arabic alphabet.

[18] In section seven, Luxenberg outlines how Islamic tradition resolved the doubts due to Muhammad's “flexibility” concerning the text that arose among the first commentators. In this section, Luxenberg applies his heuristic method on the Qur’ān to show that the Qur’ān itself gives evidence that the tradition of the seven readings, Arabic sabcat ahruf, which were permitted to Muhammad out of recognition of the many dialects of Arabic, is closely connected with the seven vowel signs of Estrangeli, the writing system developed by speakers of East Syriac. This system uses dots above and below the letters, similar to the dots used in Arabic to distinguish consonants. Tabarī also knows of the tradition that there were five readings, which he suggests correspond to the five vowel signs of West Syriac. The vowel signs of the West Syriac system are the source of the three vowel signs used in Classical Arabic.

[19] The rest of the section draws on personal names of Biblical origin in the Qur’ān to demonstrate that the so-called Arabic matres lectionis, 'alif, wāw, and yā, must also be polyvalent. Luxenberg points out that Islamic tradition admits a reading of the mater for long /ā/ in certain instances as /ē/ because this pronunciation was a peculiarity of the Arabic of Mecca. Luxenberg shows that the term harf, “sign” must also carry a meaning synonymous to qirā’at, "(way of) reading" and that this is not only supplying the vowels in an unvocalized text, but also supplying the diacritical points that distinguish consonants. It is only gradually that these diacritical points became fixed so that consonants came to have just one reading. This process of determining the value of each letter of the Qur’ān unfolded over some three hundred years. This is known from the oldest manuscripts of the Qur’ān which do not have the diacritical points distinguishing readings of a single consonant. By the time these became commonly used, Arabian commentators were no longer aware that many words were either straight Aramaic or were calques peculiar to Meccan Arabic. From this resulted the difficulties that the Qur’ān posed to even the earliest Arabian commentators.

[20] Section eight briefly outlines the difficulties facing a critical translator. Luxenberg agrees with Paret's general assessment of the difficulties, which include many unclear words and expressions, contradictory explanations in the Arabian tradition, and lack of a textus receptus with fixed diacritical points, such as for the Hebrew Bible. Moreover, even the earliest Islamic commentators are divided over many passages and offer sometimes over a dozen possible interpretations, many mutually exclusive and equally plausible.

[21] Section nine discusses the proposition, which the Qur’ān itself asserts and which is a basic element of Islam, that the Qur’ān was revealed in Arabic. In particular, the proposition that the origin of the Qur’ān, the umm kitāb (lit. “mother of [the] book”), is in heaven or with God and is the direct and immediate pre-image of the Arabic text presents the strongest dogmatic challenge to Luxenberg’s assertion that the Arabic of the Qur’ān is in large measure not Arabic at all, at least not in the sense the Arabian commentators understood it. The language of the Qur’ān is the Arabic dialect of the tribe of Muhammad, the Quraysh, who were located in Mecca. This does not rule out the possibility that this dialect was heavily influenced by Aramaic, and Syriac in particular. Luxenberg maintains that the Islamic tradition alludes to such an influence. Tabarī follows the tradition attributed to Muhammad that a scholar must seek wisdom "be it in China" and exhorts the philologists of the Qur’ān, the ahl al-lisān, to seek sound philological evidence from wherever it may come in order that the Qur’ān be clearly explained to all. Luxenberg undertakes in the subsequent chapters to mine the wisdom of this advice.

[22] Luxenberg proceeds in section ten to the heart of the matter: an analysis of the word “Qur’ān.” He sets out the argument that qur’ān derives from the Syriac qeryānā, a technical term from the Christian liturgy that means "lectionary," the fixed biblical readings used at the Divine Liturgy throughout the year. His claim rests on variations in the spelling of the word attested in early manuscripts. The word qeryānā had been written without hamza by Muhammad, according to one early witness and Luxenberg argues that this reflects a Syriac influence. According to Islamic tradition, Muhammad's dialect pronounced the hamza, the glottal stop, "weak." Indeed, the arabophone Aramaic Christians of Syria and Mesopotamia pronounce the hamza in the same way, approximately /y/. Furthermore, the Arabic-Syriac lexica which preserve several pre-Islamic variant readings of Arabic words, give for the Syriac word qeryānā both qur’ān as well as quryān. Luxenberg posits the development of the spelling of this word as follows: qeryān > qurān, written without 'alif, then qurān written with 'alif, and finally qur’ān, with an intrusive hamza. The commentators were no longer aware that yā' could represent /ā/, a use extensively attested in the writing of third-weak verbs. The rest of the section presents clarifications of other unclear passages where the obscurity arose from the same phenomenon, sometimes directly, and sometimes in conjunction with other ambiguities in the writing system, such as mispointing tā' for yā' and then applying the same derivation.

[23] The section concludes by demonstrating that the technical meaning of "lectionary" is preserved in the word qur’ān. Most striking is the conclusion that the term umm kitāb, an aramaism, must be a written source and that the Qur’ān was never intended to replace this written source. One might complain that the details of the argument for the reading of suras 12:1-2 and 3:7 are squeezed into footnotes, but nevertheless the argument is clear. Luxenberg proves that the term qur’ān itself is the key to unlocking the passages that have given commentators in and outside of the tradition frustration. If quryān means “lectionary,” and if the text itself claims to be a clarification of an earlier text, then that earlier text must be written in another language. The only candidate is the Old and New Testament in Syriac, the Peshitta. Hence the influence of Aramaic on the Arabic of Muhammad has an identifiable, textual origin. At the very end of the work, Luxenberg makes a compelling argument that sura 108 is a close allusion to the Peshitta of 1 Peter 5:8-9. Indeed this sura, which is only three lines long, is one of the most difficult passages for the Arabian as well as the Western commentators. Luxenberg shows why: it is composed of transcriptions into Arabic writing of the Syriac New Testament text, i.e., there is almost no “Arabic” in the sura. These are “revealed” texts, and insofar as the Qur’ān contains quotations or paraphrases of them, the Qur’ān is also “revealed.”

[24] Many dialects of Arabic existed at the time of Muhammad. In the ten places where the Qur’ān claims to have been written in Arabic, Luxenberg shows first that these passages have grammatical forms which are difficult for the commentators and have varying interpretations among the translators. He notes that in sura 41:44, the Arabic fassala means “to divide,” but the context here requires "make distinct" or better "interpret." Nowhere else does the Arabic word have this meaning, and the Syriac-Arabic lexica do not give the one as a translation for the other; tarjama (a direct borrowing from Syriac) is the usual Arabic word for "interpret." However, the Syriac praš / parreš can mean both "divide" as well as "interpret" (like Hebrew hibdīl; also this is an example of a “semantic calque” mentioned above). Tabarī too understands fassala to be a synonym for bayyana (sura 44:3), which also has the meaning "interpret." Sura 41:44 also clearly attests to a source for the Qur’ān that is written in a foreign language. Luxenberg, following Tabarī, notes a corruption in the text of this verse that clearly shows that part of the Qur’ān has a non-Arabic source. His argument here is somewhat weak if not for the further evidence deduced from eleven other locations in the Qur’ān where Luxenberg consistently applies these and similar arguments to difficulties all of which center on the terms related to the revelation and language of the Qur’ān. These arguments leave little doubt, that Luxenberg has uncovered a key misunderstanding of these terms throughout the Qur’ān.

[25] In section twelve Luxenberg demonstrates that not only the origin and language of the Qur’ān are different from what the commentators who wrote two hundred years after its inception claim it to be, but that several key passages contain words or idioms that were borrowed from Syriac into Arabic. From his analysis of sura 19:24 (in the so-called “Marian Sura”): "Then he called to her from beneath her: ‘Grieve not; thy Lord hath placed beneath thee a streamlet,’" he concludes that it should be read "He called to her immediately after her laying-down (to give birth ‘Grieve not; thy Lord has made your laying-down legitimate.’" Luxenberg’s lengthy discussion of the complexities of this passage resolve grammatical difficulties in the Arabic in a way that fits the context: Jesus gives Mary the courage to face her relatives even with a child born out of wedlock. The section then presents lengthy arguments dealing with various lexical, morphological, syntactic and versification problems in sura 11:116-117.

[26] Section thirteen uncovers evidence of Aramaic morphology in the grammar of the Qur’ān. Instances of ungrammatical gender agreement (feminine subject or noun with a masculine verb or modifier) arose because Syriac feminine forms were misread as an Arabic masculine singular accusative predicate adjective or participle where the governing noun is a feminine subject. In Syriac, predicate adjectives and participles are in the absolute form (predicate form). A feminine singular Syriac form transcribed into Arabic is identical to a genuine Arabic masculine singular accusative form. This phenomenon is quite pervasive in the Qur’ān (e.g. sura 19:20, 23, 28). The argument that many commentators put forward to explain these anomalies is that grammar was sacrificed to preserve the rhyme of a verse. Luxenberg shows the weakness of this argument by demonstrating that in many cases the rhyme is sacrificed to render a grammatical expression (e.g. suras 33:63 and 42:17). Moreover, in at least one case of anomalous syntax in sura 19:23, the grammatically correct word order would have fit the rhyme. In places where a masculine form corresponds to a feminine one, Luxenberg realized that the copyist had deleted the “masculine accusative singular” ending on the predicate adjective, not realizing that the adjective was a Syriac feminine predicate adjective transcribed into Arabic. These Syriac predicative/absolute forms in the Qur’ān are supported by the fact that Arabic always borrowed Syriac nouns and adjectives in their absolute form and not the emphatic (“unbound” or “dictionary”) form; e.g. allah janna for paradise, the grape then must be the fruit of paradise par excellence (p. 234). Why, if that is so, is the grape only mentioned in connection with the “heavenly” garden once?

[31] To answer this, Luxenberg presents earlier scholarship, notably that of Tor Andrae and Edmund Beck, showing a connection between the images of the garden of paradise in the Qur’ān and in the hymns of Ephraem the Syrian entitled On Paradise. Andrae remarked that hūr was likely from the Syriac word for “white,” but his solution was to say that the Qur’ānic usage was somehow metaphorical. Neither he nor Beck considered that the Arabic “virgin” was a later misunderstanding on the part of the commentators.

[32] Ephraem uses the term gupnā, “vine,” grammatically feminine, with which hūr agrees and from this Andrae concluded that it was a metaphor for “the virgins of paradise” in the Qur’ān. In suras 44:54 and 52:20, Luxenberg argues that instead of the singular cīn the plural cuyun should be read, referring to the grapes on the vine. Elsewhere the Qur’ān compares the grapes to “pearls,” and so they must be white grapes, which is not apparent from the text at first glance. Luxenberg then offers two variants of this expression. The first reading renders the phrase “white, crystal (clear grapes),” the second, and the one Luxenberg adopts, is “white (grapes), (like) jewels (of crystal).” The restored verse then reads “We will let them (the blessed in Paradise) be refreshed with white (grapes), (like) jewels (of crystal).”

[33] Of the several related examples in sections 15.2 – 15.9, Luxenberg follows the virgins of paradise through the Qur’ān. In section 15.2, Luxenberg observes that azwaj, “spouses,” also can mean “species, kinds” (suras 2:25, 3:15, and 4:57). The latter reading makes more sense “therein also are all kinds of pure (fruits).” Luxenberg links to the misunderstanding of sura 44:54 zawwaj, “join, marry.” The misinterpretation of one verse spills over into the related thematic content of another. The other sections are also well-argued. Of special interest are the discussions in sections 15.5 – 15.6 of suras 55:56 and 55:70, 72, 74, respectively, which state, referring to the virgins of paradise “whom deflowered before them has neither man nor jinn.” Instead, these are the grapes of paradise “that neither man nor jinn have defiled.” Luxenberg points out that sura 55:72 evidences another Qur’ānic parallel to Ephraem, who writes that the vines of paradise abound in “hanging grapes.”10

[34] Section sixteen follows this investigation as it points to a similar misreading of paradise’s grapes as youths, Arabic wildun. Sura 76:19 “Round amongst them go boys of perpetual youth, whom when one see, he thinks them pearls unstrung” (sura 16.1, citing Bell’s translation). Wildun is a genuinely Arabic word, but it is used in a sense which is borrowed from Syriac yaldā. Youths like pearls is somewhat suspicious, especially given that “pearls” are a metaphor for the grapes of paradise from the previous section. Luxenberg uncovered that Syriac has the expression yaldā dagpettā, “child of the vine,” appearing in the Peshitta: Matthew 26:29, Mark 14:25, and Luke 22:18, in which Christ foreshadows his death and resurrection: “I will not drink of this child of the vine (yaldā dagpettā) until the day when I drink it new in the kingdom of my Father.” Here it is the juice of the grape that is the “child.” Entries in the Arabic-Syriac lexica for each of yaldā and gpettā give in addition to “child” and “vine” “fruit” and “wine,” respectively. Luxenberg gives further evidence from suras 37:45, 43:71, and 76:15 that Ephraem the Syrian’s depiction of the grapes of paradise is behind the original Qur’ānic text.

[35] Section seventeen synthesizes the techniques and findings of the foregoing study and analyzes two complete suras: 108 and 96. Luxenberg provides for each a complete commentary and translation. The thrust of sura 108 has already been presented above. The analysis of all nineteen verses of sura 96 spans twenty-two pages. Among the many solutions provided in this section is that the particle ’a which has stumped the commentators and the grammarians is really two different words: the Syriac word ’aw “or” and the Syriac ’ēn “if, when.” Omitting here the details of the argument, this sura is to be read as a call to participate in liturgical prayer and has the “character of a Christian-Syriac prooemium, which in the later tradition was replaced by the fatiha (from Syriac ptāxā, ’opening’).” This is not just any liturgy, but the Divine Liturgy, the eucharistic commemoration, as Luxenberg reconstructs verses 17-19: “Should he [i.e., the Slanderer] wish to call his idols, he will (thereby) call a [god who] passes away! You should not at all listen to him, (rather) perform (your) liturgy and receive the Eucharist (wa-isjid wa iqtabar)” (p. 296). This is noteworthy, as this is the oldest sura according to Islamic tradition, and reveals its Christian-Syriac roots. In sura 5 “The Repast” Luxenberg indicates that closely related eucharistic terminology as in sura 96 (the proof for which is omitted in this review) suggests that the verses in sura 5:114-115 refer to the Eucharistic liturgy (and not just the Last Supper). Further evidence for this reading comes from a piece of pre-Islamic poetry by the Christian Arab poet ‘Adi ibn Zayd which the Kitāb al-aghānī of Abū l-Faraj al-Isfahānī (d. 967) preserved. Section eighteen, a brief, comprehensive summary, concludes the study.

[36] The production of the book is overall of good quality. There are certain proofreading errors, including the mis-numbering of sections (e.g., pp. 237 and 239), and very few grammatical mistakes. The page layout is at times difficult to read. This is partly due to the nature of the study, which requires Arabic, Syriac, Mandaic, and Latin alphabets to share space with footnotes and inline quotations from the sources.

[37] A work of this scope presented piece-meal necessarily lacks the cohesion and elegance of a full study. The implications of this method are nevertheless clear. Any future scientific study of the Qur’ān will necessarily have to take this method into consideration. Even if scholars disagree with the conclusions, the philological method is robust. It has established a discipline that is substantially different from the exegetical traditions of the Arabian and Western commentators. Luxenberg has called into question the view of the Qur’ān as a “pure” text, one free of the theological and philological difficulties that plague the transmission histories of other texts, e.g., the Hebrew Bible and its versions.

[38] A central question that this investigation raises is the motivation of cUthmān in preparing his redaction of the Qur’ān. Luxenberg presents the two hadīth traditions recounting how cUthmān came to possess the first manuscript. If Luxenberg’s analysis is even in broad outline correct, the content of the Qur’ān was substantially different at the time of Muhammad and cUthmān’s redaction played a part in the misreading of key passages. Were these misreadings intentional or not? The misreadings in general alter the Qur’ān from a book that is more or less harmonious with the New Testament and Syriac Christian liturgy and literature to one that is distinct, of independent origin.

[39] It is hoped that an English translation of this work will soon appear. Despite the sober revolution this book will no doubt create, one should not be naïve to think that all Islamicists in the West will immediately take up and respond to the scholarly challenges posed by any work of this kind. However, just as Christianity faced the challenges of nineteenth and twentieth century biblical and liturgical scholarship, so too will serious scholars of Islam, both East and West, benefit from the discipline Luxenberg has launched.

_______

Notes
1 The transcription of Arabic and Syriac mostly follows the standard transcription, with the noted exceptions in the Hugoye guidelines.

2 Abū Jacfar Muhammad bin Jarīr at-Tabarī, Jāmic al-bayān can ta’wīl al-Qur’ān (Cairo, 3rd ed., 1968).

3 Abū l-Fadl Jamāl ad-Dīn Muhammad bin Mukarram al-Ifriqī al-Misrī bin Manzūr, Lisān al-carab (Beirut, 1955).

4 Richard Bell, The Qur’ān; Translated, with a critical rearrangement of the Surahs, vol. 1 (Edinburgh, 1937), vol. 2 (Edinburgh, 1939).

5 Régis Blachère, Le Coran (traduit de l’arabe) (Paris, 1957).

6 Rudi Paret, Der Koran; Übersetzung (Stuttgart, Berlin, Cologne, Mainz, 2nd ed., 1982).

7 R. Payne Smith, ed., Thesaurus Syriacus, vol. 1 (Oxford, 1879), vol. 2 (Oxford, 1901).

8 Carl Brockelmann, Lexicon Syriacum (Halle in Saxony, 1928).

9 Jaques Eugène Mannā, Vocabulaire Chaldéen – Arabique (Mossul, 1900); reprinted with new appendix by Raphael J. Bidawid (Beirut, 1975).

10 Luxenberg does not give the place in Ephraem but cites Edmund Beck, Des heiligen Ephraem des Syrers Hymnen de Paradiso und contra Julianum, in Corpus Scriptorum Christianorum Orientalium (CSCO), Scriptores Syri t. 78, vols. 174 [Syriac], t. 79, vol. 175 [German translation] (Louvain, 1957). The passage to which Luxenberg refers is Hymn VII, stanza 17. In fact, one finds the text in CSCO, vol. 174, p. 29. There are many similar passages where the fruits “stretch themselves out” to those in Paradise. See Sebastian Brock, tr. and commentary, St. Ephrem the Syrian, Hymns on Paradise (Crestwood, N.Y.: St. Vladimir’s Seminary."

More to come, for "dionysus" to digest, more which will perhaps cause him to reconsider some of his sources, the same ones who told him that Luxenberg has no academic training in philology, and further, that he is not taken seriously.

In fact, despite the determined opposition of all Muslims working in this field (who will not hear of Luxenberg, and attempt in every way to discredit and belittle him among the most impressionable and naive non-Muslm students of the subject -- and are aided, of course, by non-Muslim students of early Islam who refuse to study Islam the way they would have no hesitation in studying early Judaism or early Christianity, which is to say, undeterred by the True Believers's version of events.

Start with that review, "dionysus." Don't listen to those intent on maligning Luxenberg becasue they are incapable of dealing with his arguments, or admitting that the act of questioning the divine origins of the Qur'an is what upsets them, and they are determined to blacken the name, or dismiss, all those who are engaged in this perfectly legitimate enterprise.

And once you have done that, perhaps you will begin to think for yourself, and decide that you too can study the origins of the Qur'an as freely as Western scholars study other religions. Go ahead. Try it. You'll like it.

Posted by: Hugh at January 18, 2006 10:36 AM

Regarding the fairy tale told above by the execrable Muslim troglodyte which haunts this venerable site ...

Let me get this straight... God -- the Almighty creator of the Universe, which is reckoned to be upwards of 20,000,000,000 years old, humbled himself before a filthy desert vagabond, and negotiated how many times the vagabond's equally filthy tribe of desert vermin would bow down, arses in the air, to pray to him? Furthermore, oh ye Muslim troglodyte, you would have us understand, as you so clearly believe, that God Almighty then accepted a number totalling 1/10 his initial "demand" for prayers so this desert bum, this thief, this pederast, this murdering, greedy, lying, poseur could focus on conducting sheep trades, horse trades, and slave trades with his fellow desert vermin?

Posted by: jsla at January 18, 2006 12:58 PM

Yes, I had already read the Hugoye article when it came out, but notice that it's a summary (though a good one) rather than really an assessment. Here is a review of the book from a semitist's perspective- free, I must point out of any Islamic bias (he points out that Luxenburg mangles one of his pet theories, for example):

François de Blois

Journal of Qur'anic Studies, 2003, Volume V, Issue 1, pp. 92-97.

The title of this book announces a new 'reading' of the Qur'an and the subtitle promises 'a contribution to the decoding of the language of the Qur'an.' The author's theses are summarised succinctly in his 'resumé' (pp. 299-307): the Qur'an is not written in Arabic but in an 'Aramaic-Arabic mixed language' which was spoken in Mecca at the time of Muharnmad. Mecca was 'originally an Aramaic settlement'. This is 'confirmed' by the fact that the name makkah is really Aramaic mâkkQâ, 'low'. This mixed language was recorded, from the beginning, in a defective script, i.e., without vowel signs or the diacritic points which later distinguish b, t, n, y, etc. The author denies the existence of a parallel oral tradition of Qur' an recitation. Classical Arabic comes from somewhere else (but we are not told where). The Arabs could not understand the Qur'an, known to them as it was only from defectively written manuscripts, and reinterpreted these documents in the light nf their own language. The proposed 'Aramaic reading' of the Qur'an allows us to rediscover its original meaning.

It might be useful to distinguish straight away what is new and what is not new in these theses. Muslim scholars of the classical period debated already the question of whether or not there is 'non-Arabic' (Aramaic, Persian, etc.) linguistic material in the Qur.an, whereby at least the more broad-minded authorities were content that there was; since God created all languages there is no reason why He should not have used words from different languages in His revelation. Modern linguistic scholarship established, certainly by the middle of the 19th century, that the Arabic language, both in the Qur'an and in other texts, contains a significant number of loan-words from several dialects of Aramaic (Syriac, Babylonian Aramaic, etc). Aramaic was the principal cultural language of the area between the Sinai and the Tigris for more than a millennium and it exercised a considerable influence on all the languages of the region, including the Hebrew of the later portions of the Old Testament. The Arabs participated in the civilisation of the ancient Near East, many of them were Christians or Jews, so there is nothing surprising about the fact that they borrowed heavily from Aramaic. But this does not make Arabic a 'mixed language'. What is new in Luxenberg's thesis is the ciaim that large portions of the Qur'an are not grammatically correct Arabic, but need to be read as Aramaic, inflectional endings and all. The Qur'an is thus not (grammatically) Arabic with Aramaic loan-words, but is composed in a jargon that mixes structural elements of two different languages. We shall examine the plausibility of this thesis in due course.

The second principal component of the author's argumentation is that, since the later Muslims were unable to understand the Aramaic-Arabic jargon of their sacred book, they were forced arbitrarily to add diacritic signs to the text so as to make it into halfway comprehensible (classical) Arabic, thereby inventing a supposed oral tradition to justify this new reading. To rediscover the 'original' meaning we need to disregard the diacritical signs in the traditional text and find some other reading. This line of argument is also not new. It has been pursued in recent years in a series of articles by the North American Arabist J. A. Bellamy as well as in a (particularly bad) book by the German theologian Günter Lüling; strangely, none of these are mentioned in Luxenberg's bibliography. This too will be discussed in the course of the present review. In any case, a book that announces already in the preface (p. ix) that its author has chosen not to discuss 'the whole [sic!] of the relevant literature' because this literature' makes hardly any contribution to the new method put forward here' is one that poses, from the outset, questions about its own scholarly integrity.

But let us look at a few examples of the author's 'new method'. Because of the technical linguistic nature of this discussion I will use a consistent Semitist system of transliteration (in bold) and transcription (in italics) for both Syriac and Arabic, a system differing both from the one used by the author of the book under review and from that otherwise followed by this journal.

One of the main planks of Luxenberg's theory of the 'Aramaic-Arabic mixed language' is the contention that in a number of Qur'anic passages the final aleph of an Arabic word stands not for the Arabic accusative ending -an, but for the Aramaic ending of the determinate state ( -â in the singular or -ê in the plural). On p. 30 the author discusses Q. 11:24 and Q. 39:29, where the 'current Qur'an' ('der heutige Koran') has hal yastawiyâni maQalan, 'are the two similar as an example?', the last word being an accusative of specification (tamyîz). The author thinks that the meaning is improved if is taken to be a 'transcription' of the Syriac plural mtl' (maQlê) and that the sentence consequently means 'Are the examples [plural!] similar [dual!]?'. Translated into modern Arabic' ('ins heutige Arabisch übertragen'), the Qur'anic sentence would then (supposedly) be hal yastawiyâni l-maQalâni. Most first-year students of Arabic are sure to know that this is neither classical nor modern Arabic, but simply wrong. But even without this lapsus, it can hardly be claimed that the 'Syro-Aramaic reading' offers any improvement in the understanding of the Qur'anic passages.

On p. 37 the author discusses Q. 61:61 innanî hadânî rabbî 'ilâ sirâtin mustaqîmin dînan qiyaman, which, if dînan qiyaman is in fact an accusative of specification, would need to be translated by something like 'verily, my Lord has directed me to a straight path in accordance with a firm religion', or, if we assume a mixed construction (hadâ construed first with the preposition 'ilâ and then with double accusative), it could mean '..... to a straight path, a firm religion'. Our author's proposal is that the syntactical difficulty of the latter rendering could be alleviated by taking not as an Arabic accusative but as Syriac dyn' qym' (dînâ kayyâmâ), which he translates as 'a firm belief' ('feststehender, beständiger Glaube'). But in so doing the author overlooks the fact that, unlike Arabic dînun, Aramaic dînâ does not actually mean 'belief, religion', but only 'judgement, sentence'. Arabic dîn, in the meaning 'religion', is not borrowed from Aramaic but from Middle Persian dên (Avestan daênâ-).

On pp. 39ff. the author connects the problematic Qur' anic term hanîfun with Aramaic hanpâ, 'pagan', and specifically with the Pauline doctrine of Abraham as the paradigm of salvation for the gentiles. I have recently argued along similar lines in a lecture delivered in the summer of the year 2000 and eventually published in Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 65 (2002), pp. 16-25, but differently from 'Luxenberg' I did not fail to mention that the same suggestion had been made long ago both by Margoliouth and by Ahrens, nor did I commit the absurdity of claiming (as our author does on p. 39) that Arabic is a 'Wiedergabe' of Syriac hnp', despite the fact that the Arabic form has an -i-, of which there is no trace in Syriac.

But in the eyes of our author, the Aramaic suffixes -â and -ê are 'represented' in the Qur'an not only by alif, but also by ha'. Thus [p. 34] Arabic (xalîfatun) is 'the phonetic transcription' of Syriac hlyp' (hlîfâ). Unfortunately, no reasonis given for why, in this 'phonetic transcription', the Aramaic laryngeal h is not 'transcribed' by the phonetically identical Arabic laryngeal h, but by x.

On p. 35 the author discusses the Qur'anic word for 'angels' (plural), for which the traditional reading is malâ'ikatun. The author thinks that this is really the Syriac word for 'angels', which he spells, in Syriac script, (correctly) as ml'k', and which he transcribes (wrongly) as malâkê; in fact, the correct Syriac vocalisation is malaxê (the first aleph being left over from the older form *mal'ax- ) In any case, neither the Syriac spelling, nor the correct vocalisation, nor even the author's erroneous vocalisation explains the -y- of the Arabic plural. The author then goes on to claim that the postulated 'Syro-Aramaic pronunciation' of the Qur'anic plural is made certain ('gesichert') by the 'modern Arabic of the Near East malâykê. This is a big jumble. In fact, the Arabic singular mal'akun or malakun is in all likelihood borrowed from Aramaic mal'ax- or malax-, but the plural malâ'ikatun is a perfectly regular Arabic formation, and is represented graphically by , with the usual Qur'anic defective spelling of internal -a-. The cited 'modern Arabic' (more correctly Levantine) form is the expected dialectal reflex of the classical pausal form malâ'ika(h), with palatalisation ( 'imalah) of the final -a to -e (I see little justification for the transcription with long -e), and has nothing to do with the Syriac plural malaxê.

But once the 'mixed-language' status of the Qur'an has been postulated, the author evidently thinks it possible to take any Arabic word that vaguely resembles something in Syriac and to determine its meaning not from the Arabic but from the Syriac lexicon. Thus on pp. 196ff. the very ordinary Arabic verb daraba, 'to beat', is quite arbitrarily said to derive from the Syriac verb traf, which, among other things, means 'to beat, to move, to shake (wings), etc.' Brockelmann, Lexicon Syriacum, p. 290, compares the Arabic verb tarafa, 'to repel'. It seems unlikely that the Aramaic root should also have anything to do with Arabic daraba; the correspondences d/t and b/p(f) are certainly not the norm in Semitic cognates and would be perhaps even more surprising in the case of a loan-word. But this difficulty does not stop the author from assigning the meanings of the Syriac word to the various occurrence of daraba in the Qur'an.

Then, on p. 283 the author claims that the Arabic verb taga, 'to rebel, tyrannise, etc.' has, apart from the secondary , nothing Arabic about it', but is a 'borrowing' from Syriac t`a. He then picks out of a Syriac dictionary the meaning 'to forget' and assigns this to the Qur'anic instances of taga. But the fact that the Arabic root has gayn where the Aramaic has `ayin shows very clearly that the Arabic word is not borrowed from Aramaic, but that they are good Semitic cognates. Anyway, the usual meaning of Syriac t`a is 'to err, to be led into error, etc.', although it can also mean 'to forget'. So even if the Arabic verb were a borrowing from Syriac there would still be nothing compelling about the new meaning assigned to it by our author.

I shall quote one last example of the author's 'Syro-Aramaic reading' of the Qur'anic text. In Q. 96:19 the last word of the sura is (i)qtarib, which has until now always heen understand to mean 'draw near' (imperative). But our author [p. 296] thinks it means 'take part in the eucharist' ('nimm an der Abendmahlliturgie teil'), since iqtaraba is 'without doubt borrowed' ('ohne Zweifel .... entlehnt') from the Syriac verb eQkarrab, which besides meaning 'to draw near', also means more specifically 'to (draw near to the altar to) receive the eucharist'. In support of this he quotes (on p. 298, in the wake of some editorial mishap twice) a passage from the Kitabu 1-'agani) in which the Arabic verb taqarraba is used unambiguously to mean 'receive the (Christian) eucharist'. But this alleged confirmation scuppers the author's argument. The (actually well-known) Christian Arabic technical term taqarraba is indeed a calque on Syriac eQkarrab, with the same stem formation, i.e., D-stem with prefix t(a)-. There is no good reason to assume that the same Syriac verb was 'borrowed' a second time as the (differently formed) stem iqtaraba.

The examples that I have quoted could be expanded manyfold, but they are perhaps enough. They illustrate what is actually the less controversial, or in any case less fantastical part of the author's line of argument, the part, namely, in which he applies his 'Syro-Aramaic reading' to the actual traditional text of the Qur'an. But this book goes a lot further. Having established (as he thinks) that the Qur'an is composed in an Aramaic-Arabic 'mixed language' the author proceeds to juggle the diacritic points of the traditional text to create an entirely new Qur' an which he then attempts to decipher with the help of his (as we have observed, often very shaky) knowledge of Syriac. I do not really think that there is very much point in discussing this aspect of the book. There is no doubt that, without the diacritical points, the Qur'an is indeed an extremely obscure work and that the possibility of repointing affords virtually limitless opportunities to reinterpret the scripture, in Arabic or in any other language that one chooses. I think, however, that any reader who wants to take the trouble to plough through Luxenberg's 'new reading' of any of the numerous passages discussed in this book will concede that the 'new reading' does not actually make better sense than a straight classical Arabic reading of the traditional text. It is a reading that is potentially attractive only in its novelty, or shall I say its perversity, not in that it sheds any light on the meaning of the book or on the history of Islam.

--------

My point, again, is that there is simply better, more scholarly sound work out there about this and hanging on to Luxenburg is a dangerous game because it casts suspicion on other valid points you might be making.
One example of a more sound basis for one of Luxenburg's points- the rather interesting possibility of a connection between Syriac hanpa "pagan" and Arabic hanif would be an article by the writer of that review:
"Naṣrānī (Ναζωραῖος) and ḥanīf (εθνικός):studies on the religious vocabulary of Christianity and Islam" in Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, vol. 65, no. i, pp. 1-30, 2002.

Another, better example (although unrelated to the Luxenburg issue) is that rather than hanging on to Crone and Cook's Hagarism, which though it was interesting in its time is now quite dated, I would suggest getting ahold of Robert Hoyland's Seeing Islam as Others Saw It
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0878501258/sr=1-1/qid=1137607031/ref=pd_bbs_1/103-3264386-6601464?%5Fencoding=UTF8
which, instead of making sensationalist claims simply provides translations of and information on just about every text touching on early Islam written by non-Muslims and thus is probably a more useful starting-off point for criticism of the traditional Islamic narrative- and one that can't exatly be rejected out-of-hand by a thinking Muslim audience. But that's me digressing...

Posted by: the_dionysus_monkey at January 18, 2006 1:32 PM

Jsla says "God Almighty then accepted a number totalling 1/10 his initial "demand" for prayers so this desert bum, this thief, this pederast, this murdering, greedy, lying, poseur could focus on conducting sheep trades, horse trades, and slave trades with his fellow desert vermin"?

Jsla....Jesus, and Moses was consulted...what's your problem....displaying intense jelousy like this does not suit the infidel.

Posted by: Naseem at January 18, 2006 2:17 PM

jsla, I have printed out your request for clarification from Naseem, and will probably have it framed. (C'mon, where is Caroline with her gold stars?)

Posted by: Infidel33 at January 18, 2006 4:31 PM

Here is an interview that Luxenberg gave last year, and that may serve as an introduction to his work:

An interview with "Christoph Luxenberg" by Alfred Hackensberger
Jusfiq Hadjar
Thu, 14 Apr 2005 04:32:33 -0700

The Virgins and the Grapes: the Christian Origins of the Koran

A German scholar of ancient languages takes a new look at the sacred
book of Islam. He maintains that it was created by Syro-Aramaic
speaking Christians, in order to evangelize the Arabs. And he
translates it in a new way

by Sandro Magister

ROMA - That Aramaic was the lingua franca of a vast area of the
ancient Middle East is a notion that is by now amply noted by a vast
public, thanks to Mel Gibson´s film "The Passion of the Christ,"
which everyone watches in that language.

But that Syro-Aramaic was also the root of the Koran, and of the
Koran of a primitive Christian system, is a more specialized notion,
an almost clandestine one. And it´s more than a little dangerous. The
author of the most important book on the subject - a German professor
of ancient Semitic and Arabic languages - preferred, out of prudence,
to write under the pseudonym of Christoph Luxenberg. A few years ago,
one of his colleagues at the University of Nablus in Palestine,
Suliman Bashear, was thrown out of the window by his scandalized
Muslim students.

In the Europe of the 16th and 17th centuries, mangled by the wars of
religion, scholars of the Bible also used to keep a safe distance
with pseudonyms. But if, now, the ones doing so are the scholars of
the Koran, this is a sign that, for the Muslim holy book as well, the
era of historical, linguistic, and philological re-readings has begun.

This is a promising beginning for many reasons. Gerd-Rüdiger Puin, a
professor at Saarland University in Germany and another Koran scholar
on the philological level, maintains that this type of approach to
Islam´s holy book can help to defeat its fundamentalist and Manichean
readings, and to bring into a better light its ties with Judaism and
Christianity.

The book by "Christoph Luxenberg" came out in 2000 in Germany with
the title "Die Syro-Aramäische Lesart des Koran" ("A Syro-Aramaic
Reading of the Koran"), published in Berlin by Das Arabische Buch. It
is out of print, and there are no translations in other languages.
But a new, updated edition (again in German) is about to arrive in
bookstores.

Here follows an interview with the author, published in Germany in
the newspaper "Süddeutsche Zeitung" and in Italy in "L´espresso," no.
11, March 12-18, 2004:

>From the Gospel to Islam

An interview with "Christoph Luxenberg" by Alfred Hackensberger

Q. - Professor, why did you think it useful to conduct this re-
reading of the Koran?

A. - "Because, in the Koran, there are many obscure points that, from
the beginning, even the Arab commentators were not able to explain.
Of these passages it is said that only God can comprehend them.
Western research on the Koran, which has been conducted in a
systematic manner only since about the middle of the 19th century,
has always taken as its base the commentaries of the Arab scholars.
But these have never gone beyond the etymological explanation of some
terms of foreign origin."

Q. - What makes your method different?

A. - "I began from the idea that the language of the Koran must be
studied from an historical-linguistic point of view. When the Koran
was composed, Arabic did not exist as a written language; thus it
seemed evident to me that it was necessary to take into
consideration, above all, Aramaic, which at the time, between the 4th
and 7th centuries, was not only the language of written
communication, but also the lingua franca of that area of Western
Asia."

Q. - Tell us how you proceeded.

A. - "At first I conducted a ´synchronous´ reading. In other words, I
kept in mind both Arabic and Aramaic. Thanks to this procedure, I was
able to discover the extent of the previously unsuspected influence
of Aramaic upon the language of the Koran: in point of fact, much of
what now passes under the name of ´classical Arabic´ is of Aramaic
derivation."

Q. - What do you say, then, about the idea, accepted until now, that
the Koran was the first book written in Arabic?

A. - "According to Islamic tradition, the Koran dates back to the 7th
century, while the first examples of Arabic literature in the full
sense of the phrase are found only two centuries later, at the time
of the ´Biography of the Prophet´; that is, of the life of Mohammed
as written by Ibn Hisham, who died in 828. We may thus establish that
post-Koranic Arabic literature developed by degrees, in the period
following the work of al-Khalil bin Ahmad, who died in 786, the
founder of Arabic lexicography (kitab al-ayn), and of Sibawwayh, who
died in 796, to whom the grammar of classical Arabic is due. Now, if
we assume that the composition of the Koran was brought to an end in
the year of the Prophet Mohammed´s death, in 632, we find before us
an interval of 150 years, during which there is no trace of Arabic
literature worthy of note."

Q. - So at the time of Mohammed Arabic did not have precise rules,
and was not used for written communication. Then how did the Koran
come to be written?

A. - "At that time, there were no Arab schools - except, perhaps, for
the Christian centers of al-Anbar and al-Hira, in southern
Mesopotamia, or what is now Iraq. The Arabs of that region had been
Christianized and instructed by Syrian Christians. Their liturgical
language was Syro-Aramaic. And this was the vehicle of their culture,
and more generally the language of written communication."

Q. - What is the relationship between this language of culture and
the origin of the Koran?

A. - "Beginning in the third century, the Syrian Christians did not
limit themselves to bringing their evangelical mission to nearby
countries, like Armenia or Persia. They pressed on toward distant
territories, all the way to the borders of China and the western
coast of India, in addition to the entire Arabian peninsula all the
way to Yemen and Ethiopia. It is thus rather probable that, in order
to proclaim the Christian message to the Arabic peoples, they would
have used (among others) the language of the Bedouins, or Arabic. In
order to spread the Gospel, they necessarily made use of a mishmash
of languages. But in an era in which Arabic was just an assembly of
dialects and had no written form, the missionaries had no choice but
to resort to their own literary language and their own culture; that
is, to Syro-Aramaic. The result was that the language of the Koran
was born as a written Arabic language, but one of Arab-Aramaic
derivation."

Q. - Do you mean that anyone who does not keep the Syro-Aramaic
language in mind cannot translate and interpret the Koran correctly?

A. - "Yes. Anyone who wants to make a thorough study of the Koran
must have a background in the Syro-Aramaic grammar and literature of
that period, the 7th century. Only thus can he identify the original
meaning of Arabic expressions whose semantic interpretation can be
established definitively only by retranslating them into Syro-
Aramaic."

Q. - Let´s come to the misunderstandings. One of the most glaring
errors you cite is that of the virgins promised, in the Islamic
paradise, to the suicide bombers.

A. - "We begin from the term ´huri,´ for which the Arabic
commentators could not find any meaning other than those heavenly
virgins. But if one keeps in mind the derivations from Syro-Aramaic,
that expression indicated ´white grapes,´ which is one of the
symbolic elements of the Christian paradise, recalled in the Last
Supper of Jesus. There´s another Koranic expression, falsely
interpreted as ´the children´ or ´the youths´ of paradise: in
Aramaic: it designates the fruit of the vine, which in the Koran is
compared to pearls. As for the symbols of paradise, these
interpretive errors are probably connected to the male monopoly in
Koranic commentary and interpretation."

Q. - By the way, what do you think about the Islamic veil?

A. - "There is a passage in Sura 24, verse 31, which in Arabic reads,
´That they should beat their khumurs against their bags.´ It is an
incomprehensible phrase, for which the following interpretation has
been sought: ´That they should extend their kerchiefs from their
heads to their breasts.´ But if this passage is read in the light of
Syro-Aramaic, it simply means: ´They should fasten their belts around
their waists.´"

Q. - Does this mean the veil is really a chastity belt?

A. - "Not exactly. It is true that, in the Christian tradition, the
belt is associated with chastity: Mary is depicted with a belt
fastened around her waist. But in the gospel account of the Last
Supper, Christ also ties an apron around his waist before washing the
Apostles´ feet. There are clearly many parallels with the Christian
faith."

Q. - You have discovered that Sura 97 of the Koran mentions the
Nativity. And in your translation of the famous Sura of Mary,
her "birthgiving" is "made legitimate by the Lord." Moreover, the
text contains the invitation to come to the sacred liturgy, to the
Mass. Would the Koran, then, be nothing other than an Arabic version
of the Christian Bible?

A. - "In its origin, the Koran is a Syro-Aramaic liturgical book,
with hymns and extracts from Scriptures which might have been used in
sacred Christian services. In the second place, one may see in the
Koran the beginning of a preaching directed toward transmitting the
belief in the Sacred Scriptures to the pagans of Mecca, in the Arabic
language. Its socio-political sections, which are not especially
related to the original Koran, were added later in Medina. At its
beginning, the Koran was not conceived as the foundation of a new
religion. It presupposes belief in the Scriptures, and thus
functioned merely as an inroad into Arabic society."

Q. - To many Muslim believers, for whom the Koran is the holy book
and the only truth, your conclusions could seem blasphemous. What
reactions have you noticed up until now?

A. - "In Pakistan, the sale of the edition of ´Newsweek´ that
contained an article on my book was banned. Otherwise, I must say
that, in my encounters with Muslims, I have not noticed any hostile
attitudes. On the contrary, they have appreciated the commitment of a
non-Muslim to studies aimed at an objective comprehension of their
sacred text. My work could be judged as blasphemous only by those who
decide to cling to errors in the interpretation of the word of God.
But in the Koran it is written, ´No one can bring to the right way
those whom God induces to error.´"

Q. - Aren´t you afraid of a fatwa, a death sentence like the one
pronounced against Salman Rushdie?

A. - "I am not a Muslim, so I don´t run that risk. Besides, I haven´t