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There is a controversy surrounding the work of the philologist of Syriac (that is, the Aramaic used in and around Edessa), Christoph Luxenberg. He suggests that the best way to clear up the approximately 20% of the Qur'an that does not make sense, or that contains a meaning that is only guessed at, is to posit an Ur-text, in Aramaic, or rather in Syriac, a text that begins as a Christian lectionary.
Muslims have done what they can to ignore the book and to try to get it ignored by others. But among those Western students of the early Qur'an -- and there are not many qualified to review Luxenberg's book, for they would need to have a native or near-native command of Arabic as well as his command of Aramaic -- some have been greatly impressed. Others have been less impressed at first but have begun to come round, others less impressed and refusing to come round. When it comes to such matters, fear plays a part -- that is, outright physical fear, but also, and from the most surprising sources, simply a fear of antagonizing one's Muslim colleagues. It is an absurd situation.
Luxenberg did not appear out of nowhere. There was Alphonse Mingana, in the teens of the last century. There was Arthur Jeffrey's study of foreign loan-words in the Qur'an (the very idea that the Qur'an might be written in something other than the purest of classical Arabic, untainted by words from outside, disturbs many). This book was published in a sumptuous edition, with typefaces in a half-dozen languages, by the tolerant and intelligent man who was then Gaekwar of Baroda.
One may consult the new, English-language edition of Luxenberg's "Die Syro-aramaische Lesart des Koran" which, I assume, is based on the latest, that is the third, edition of his book in German. He has also written, incidentally, a study of the Arabic, but not, he argues, Qur'anic, inscriptions on the Dome of the Rock -- a study that suggests the Dome of the Rock may not be quite the Muslim structure everyone has always assumed it to be.
As for the Hadith and the Sira, the best guide to these matters is that tireless writer, scholar, and compiler and prompter of others' scholarship, Ibn Warraq.
See his "What the Koran Really Says" and "The Origins of the Koran" and "The Quest for the Historical Muhammad." And google a few names: Alfred-Louis De Premare, Gerd Puin, Andrew Rippin should get one going to an area that is not easy going.
The work of Luxenburg, and of others working on the origins of early Islam -- including the redoubtable Patricia Crone at the Institute for Advanced Study -- is not intended to be a weapon of self-defense by Infidels. But weapon such scholarship is, for Islam itself, which requires all Muslims to be literalists, and relies on claims that the Qur'an is the immutable word of God, as dictated by the Angel Gabriel to an illiterate Arab, Muhammad (and from the Qur'an were spun the tales of the hadith, by several generations of pious but highly-imaginative storytellers), will not be able to withstand, as Christianity and Judaism withstood, the scrutiny and analysis of the Higher Biblical Criticism. Crone and others have already, with a wide variety of evidence, suggested the non-Hijazi origins of Islam; there is no evidence for the existence of "Mecca" in the Hijaz as an entrepot, or even as a village, in the period ascribed to it in Islam; there is, however, archeological and other evidence for a different place of origin. Luxenberg's evidence for the Aramaic words in the Qur'an, and his demonstration that many of the otherwise incomprehensible passages in the Qur'an make sense when we read the words as Syriac, not Arabic, is formidable and convincing. There is also doubt, among the handful of serious Western scholars capable of working in this area, even as to the existence of the "historical Muhammad"; we who are Infidels can permit ourselves the luxury of studying the matter in freedom; Muslims cannot, or will not, for if they are not frightened for their physical safety, they are enslaved by their own mind-forged manacles; they cannot allow themselves, save for a few brave exceptions, to examine or analyze the origins of early Islam as is by now routine for Christians and Jews to study the origins, over time, of Judaism and of Christianity.
It is maddening that so many of the Irwin Coreys of this world (Corey, a comic who billed himself as "the world's greatest authorities") make pronouncements on Islam without having studied it seriously. They would not make such pronouncements on elementary particle physics; what makes them think they know, really know, what the tenets of Islam are, and the origins of the belief-system, and how it spread, and what its peculiar appeal may be, and what its intellectual, political, and economic weaknesses are, and how it might be intelligently undercut and at least some of its followers persuaded that the Qur'an is NOT the literal word of God and must be understood historically. Unless they are prepared to spend a solid year or two on the serious scholarship (not the Espositos and Armstrongs and Saids, but the real scholars), perhaps by first acquiring a CD of the Index Islamicus, they should be a bit more hesitant about sounding off on "Islam" in the New York Times or elsewhere.
Luxenburg's work is of tremendous interest, to scholars and even, let it be said, to policymakers -- if only they had their wits fully about them -- all over the Infidel world. Luxenburg's astonishing philological work deserves attention. He deserves to be protected, and supported to the fullest. And the world of Infidels should understand that the implications of his work, and that of others, are shattering. One can imagine that somewhere -- in the depths of the British Museum, or the Cairo Museum, or even in the rubble of the Baghdad Museum, deep in some sanctum sanctorum, there exists an early Qur'anic text written in -- yes, Syriac -- with quotations from Efrem the Syrian. Or perhaps such a text long ago made its way into the collection of a freethinking, fabulously rich Kuwaiti, who naturally keeps the text not in Kuwait, but in one of his many homes (let us say, in a fire-proof safe, in an innocuous-looking house on his estate in Kent, or Surrey), and shows it to a handful of fellow Arab freethinkers sworn, on pain of death, to secrecy. They know what such a text would imply not only for the history of early Islam, and for Believers today. If publicly known, if analyzed, it would shake the foundations of Muslim belief, or at least the beliefs of that small, but significant, number of Muslims who retain the capacity for independent thought.
Posted by Hugh at August 30, 2007 11:10 AM
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Im sure westerners will jump at the chance to have a new safer Quran ,I doubt muslims will go for it any better than the Qadianiyyah plot.
Posted by: KAOSKTRL![[TypeKey Profile Page]](http://www.jihadwatch.org/dhimmiwatch/nav-commenters.gif)
at August 30, 2007 11:55 AM
Dear Hugh,
Thank you so much for the education on these matters. For those of us (most) who cannot read Arabic, we depend on people like you & Robert to keep us abreast of recent scholarship.
Much appreciated!
at August 30, 2007 11:56 AM
"Qur'anic, inscriptions on the Dome of the Rock ""
"Ye ole loo, use at your own risk"...-
Posted by: exsgtbrown at August 30, 2007 12:06 PM
"If publicly known, if analyzed, it would shake the foundations of Muslim belief, or at least the beliefs of that small, but significant, number of Muslims who retain the capacity for independent thought."
....those few MUslims who do elect to speak out mysterioulsy vanish into the dustbins of history...
at August 30, 2007 12:13 PM
You can have 10,000 ,000 infidels knowing the Quran is a fraud and doesnt hold up to any real scrutiny , None of that has any effect on muslims or jihad, They know you are a liar and cant be trusted. The Quran has inoculated them against the truth.
Posted by: KAOSKTRL at August 30, 2007 12:22 PM
I have been very interested in this whole idea but I can not read any of the languages. What if the Quran using the correct translation did support the Gospel?
When I have brought this up on various Muslim forums I have been blasted!! I take that to mean they are scared to death of evening thnking about it for a second.
Posted by: pvb at August 30, 2007 12:31 PM
Some conclusions Luxenberg comes to when he takes the position that the koran is an arabic misunderstanding by arabs of its syriac text. Wikepedia reports certain key findings of Luxenberg which are quite interesting:
* The word Qur'an itself is derived from 'qeryana', a Syriac term from the Christian liturgy that means ‘lectionary’ a book of liturgical readings. The book being a Syro-Aramaic lectionary, with hymns and Biblical extracts, created for use in Christian services. This lectionary was translated into Arabic as a missionary effort. It was not meant to start a new religion, but to spread an older one.
5th Century Christian mural representing the white grapes symbolism located in the Coptic monastery Deir al-Suryan ("The Syriacs") in the Wadi Natrun in Egypt 5th Century Christian mural representing the white grapes symbolism located in the Coptic monastery Deir al-Suryan ("The Syriacs") in the Wadi Natrun in Egypt
* The word huri, usually interpreted by generations of readers as wide-eyed virgins (who will serve the faithful in Paradise; Qur'an 44:54, 52:20 ,55:72, 56:22) actually means white grapes. He says that many Christian descriptions of Paradise describe it as abounding in pure white grapes. This sparked much joking in the Western press; suicide bombers would be expecting beautiful women and getting grapes.[7]
* The Quranic passage in Sura 24 commanding women to cover themselves, one of the texts on which the doctrine of hijab is based, actually commands women to "snap their belts around their waists".
* The passage in Sura 33 that has usually been translated as "seal of the prophets" actually means "witness". By this reading, Muhammad is not the greatest of the prophets, but only a witness to those prophets who came before him.
* The Qur'an was composed in a mixed Arabic-Syriac language, the traders' language of Mecca.
* The interpretative mistakes that were made by the first commentators suggests that there must have been a gap in the oral transmission of the Qur'a
Posted by: David England at August 30, 2007 12:47 PM
I suggested long ago at this site that someone might discover, deep in the dust-covered corner, of a neglected basement, in the small building once housing a long-gone alfarrabista in a back-alley in Lisbon, an Ur-Qur'an. And that Ur-Qur'an, that is a text much more of which would be in Aramaic, or rather Syriac (the Aramaic of Edessa), and would clearly demonstrate its origin in what was originally (as Luxenberg suggests) a Christian lectionary.
While few scholars in the world would be capable of judging such a find, the few who are would at first be skeptical and then, one by one, even the timid, be forced to recognize -- and there would be carbon-dating, and all the rest of it -- that this was indeed an Ur-Qur'an, from the late seventh century. And when everyone, when Michael Cook and Patricia Crone decide that they must go along with Alfred-Louis de Premare and Andrew Rippen and Gerd Puin and many others from every country, and then a few brave Muslim-for-identification-purposes-only Muslims begin to write, first in the Arab press in London, and then elsewhere, that "we Muslims must allow Islam to be subject to scholarly investigation just as Jews and Christians ahve allowed" and the all-hell-that-breaks-loose turns out to be not quite so hellish, and the Aga Khan endorses the idea, and then some maghrebin intellectuals follow suit, and so do a handful of disaffected (but carefully not yet declared apostates) Pakistanis living in the West, and then it turns out that that Ur-Qur'an is not only the missing link between that posited lectionary and the received, Muslim version (there are, or were, actually two, but very close, so let's leave that out of it) but has the little added benefit of possibly making Muslims capable of living in peace, rather than in a state of permanent war (though not necessarily warfare) with Infidels, and it no longer will have to be done through hocus-pocus smoke-and-mirror appeals that may in any case be made by so-called "reformers" who wish mainly to get the Infidels off of Islam's case but now, if they wish, can use this Ur-Qur'an to make the case better.
And World Peace will reign. And Harmony, Universal Harmony. And the World's Great Age will begin anew.
You heard it here first.
Hollywood: what about that movie deal? Write to me c/o Robert.
Posted by: Hugh at August 30, 2007 1:45 PM
It's too bad Christoph Luxenberg's book is unreadable in English, unless Amazon has a translation I'm not aware us. But even if I could get an English translation I wouldn't be able to judge the arguments at all. It is something to keep an eye on, though.
Posted by: pneumatikon at August 30, 2007 2:37 PM
Okay, I just found this blog. The worm turns!
Posted by: pneumatikon at August 30, 2007 3:03 PM
An English translation of "The Syro-Aramaic Reading of the Koran" was published this year. Bookstores are unlikely to have it in stock, but you can order it.
Posted by: Hugh at August 30, 2007 3:24 PM
An English translation of "The Syro-Aramaic Reading of the Koran" was published this year. No doubt bookstores are unlikely to have it, but you can order it.
Thanks. I'll look for it.
I know the Muslim world's going to throw a fit over the upcoming results of these investigations, but I tell you right now, from reading a major review of the book, that research in the evolution of DNA has actually given very potent tools to people wanting to use Luxenberg's methods. These tool have been used successfully to track the evolution of languages and other literary texts.
My prediction? Christianity was first established in Edessa by Gnostics, Muhammad was Gnostic, and the history of Islam will be proof of our assertion that Jesus didn't pass his on Wisdom willy-nilly to just anybody. It takes years of preparation to properly digest it. Putting such Wisdom in the hands of the mentally and theoretically weak has always been a catastrophe waiting to happen. Whether Muhammad himself was that catastrophe, or the people who came after him, remains to be seen.
at August 30, 2007 4:12 PM
It's interesting to speculate as to whether it has been deliberately scrubbed from their site, but Newsweek no longer Has Luxenberg's article online. In fact, a search of his name returns only one article, from 2006, in which someone called Steve Luxenberg is mentioned by name.
at August 30, 2007 4:16 PM
In reading a translation of the Qur'an, it is obvious to me that it was written long after Mohammed's death. I'm not suprised to discover that there might be an "earlier" version written in a different language than Arabic. Does that mean that pious Muslims are also reading a "translation" of the Qur'an?
Posted by: tanstaafl at August 30, 2007 9:06 PM
There has been a movement in South Asia to claim that all the religions were true at some point (including Vedic and Buddhism!!!) and all when they were true preached true Islamic teachings. But with the time they become corrupt and Mohammad is the ultimate prophet, and their most significant arguements are based on the claim of Mohammad and his description in Quran and Hadith begin historically true, as well as preservation of Koran in the form in which it was revealed. THey claim Arabic to be the most perfect language in the world and of such a nature that any addition or deletion will be self evident.
Although these arguments, even if they were true do not prove what they aim at, non believers like me (or at least me) never question the assertions of the 'followers of religion of peace' regarding the historical records of Koran and Mohammad. Rather I used to think that in a culture where questioning and doubts were punishable by stoning, things might have been continued in their dead, fossilized form for centuries.
But Thanks Hugh for clearing up this confusion. This is the biggest news of the year for me, and I guess would be for many infidels.
at August 30, 2007 9:30 PM
pneumatikon -
classic, apostolic, orthodox Christianity, as practised by Catholics, Eastern Orthodox and western Protestants, is not gnostic and never has been. It is, indeed, diametrically opposite to gnosticism. It ALSO has nothing whatever in common with Islam as either taught or practised anywhere, ever (former Muslims who have converted to Christianity testify to this fact, repeatedly).
The central fact of Judaism is: the Covenant Love of YHWH, publicly sealed with the whole people of Israel at Sinai. The central fact of Christianity is NOT Knowledge, gnosis, but agape, Holy Charity, as enacted in the life, bodily death, and bodily resurrection of Jesus the Jew of Nazareth.
You might like to reflect on this story from a friend of mine who teaches comparative religion at the university of Sydney. She had in her class a girl from a religious Jewish home who had, therefore, never read the Christian scriptures.
My friend gave the class the following assignment: read one of the gospels and pick out which bits are 'Jewish' and which bits are 'gentile'/ 'Greek'/ 'non-Jewish'.
The Jewish girl went away and read the gospel. After a while she came to my friend and said: "I can find nothing here that is NOT Jewish".
If you wish to understand BIBLICAL Christianity, read Jacques Ellul, "The Humiliation of the Word", and David Bentley Hart, "The Beauty of the Infinite: the Aesthetics of Christian Truth". You will understand from that, two things: first of all, just how very, very different Biblical Christianity is from Islam; and secondly, that Biblical religion is - in every possible way, from its subtlest theological and metaphysical assumptions, right through to its daily practice - utterly opposed to the idea that there is a special superior sort of knowledge that is restricted only to special superior people.
Biblical Revelation is - precisely - Revelation: it is open, public and propositional, transparent as glass, 'a city set on a hill', a lamp placed on a lampstand; there is NO "inner ring" (as C S Lewis once called it), NO esoteric/ exoteric distinction.
Everything about it, including its perpetual effort of translation of the sacred texts into the common languages of the common people, has to do with this absolute transparency. There is nothing LESS 'secret/sacred' than an obscenely naked Jewish rabbi nailed up in broad daylight beside the road, outside the city of Jerusalem, with a sign tacked up over him:" This is the King of the Jews". Or, for that matter, a shockingly empty tomb gaping open, and a pile of grave-clothes left in a heap; and a live man inviting his friend to view his scars.
Revoltingly democratic, isn't it? All blood, and mess, and dirt and tears, weeping Mary and weeping Peter (such horrid, common little people, carpenters and fisherfolk); it has offended pagan and philosophic/ aristocratic/ autocratic sensibilities all the way from the early gnostics to Nietzsche.
It offended 'Mohammed', by which name we may conveniently label the Arab imperialists who re/wrote the Qur'an; for they worshipped Power, Power, and Absolute Will. They could not comprehend the idea of covenant love, or the divine paradox of the Word of God as a wordless infant (hence the bizarre gnostic/ Muslim story of Jesus sermonising from the crib, which replaces Luke's much more historically down-to-earth account of the twelve-year-old Jesus discussing Torah with the Jewish scribes in the Temple in Jerusalem). 'Mohammed' could not even begin to imagine the infinite self-offering of an incarnate God who would plunge even into the grave - and so Islam reproduces the gnostic idea that 'he wasn't REALLY crucified' - because how could Supreme Power (ugh!) DIE?
The English author Charles Williams defines Gnosticism, versus Christianity, thus: "'See, Understand, Enjoy' said the Gnostics. 'Repent, believe, love', said the Church - 'and if you see something by the way, SAY SO'".
Your argument - claiming that all religions are 'really' gnosticism in their special, hidden, secret 'inner ring' and thus seeking to rewrite Jesus the Torah-reading Jew as a gnostic master, while claiming that all Islam's problems are due merely to a 'misunderstanding' of Gnostic secrets by the unfit - is EXACTLY THE SAME as Islam's attempt to claim that all religions are 'really' Islam and that wherever their recorded texts differ from Islam, their followers have 'distorted' or 'falsified' the 'truth'.
If historic Christianity (founded in historic Israel, at Jerusalem) and historic Islam (of Baghdad?) were both 'really' Gnosticism at heart, they would be identical. They are not, as Robert has shown in 'Religion of Peace'.
Historic apostolic Christianity, as publicly practised and confessed by ordinary Christians from the first century onwards, has a great deal in common with historic Judaism despite their well publicised quarrels. Both are in every respect diametrically different from historic Islam.
Islam has gnostic features, yes, in abundance. I would argue that some of the peculiarly destructive features of Islam may flow directly from its gnosticism AS SUCH, not from any 'misunderstanding' of same.
But neither Judaism nor Christianity can be forced into the procrustean bed of gnostic philosophy without being turned into something that neither their many martyrs, nor their greatest theologians would recognise as having anything in common with 'Tradition'.
Posted by: dumbledoresarmy at August 30, 2007 10:47 PM
"Islam has gnostic features, yes, in abundance. I would argue that some of the peculiarly destructive features of Islam may flow directly from its gnosticism AS SUCH, not from any 'misunderstanding' of same." (above)
Picking up on that, and allowing that this is not exactly in the realm of Hugh's "higher criticism" of the Qur'an but criticism nevertheless, a study of why science never got past a certain basic level in Islam could do a lot worse than start with a very recent book by a secular Turk, Taner Edis, "An Illusion of Harmony: Science and Religion in Islam". This physics prof writes clearly and for the layman and lays out some of the major reasons why science and Islam are incompatible. The reader will want to follow up by checking for example Toby Huff and George Makdisi, and will see the Sufi/gnostic Muslim spokesman who has had most to say in this area, S.H. Nasr, has precisely because of his Sufi/gnostic approach, had the least to contribute.
The cyclically confused, depressed and elated Ziauddin Sardar, also prominent in this area of "Islamic science" currently seems in a negative space, quite pessimistic about Islam's chances of ever regaining claimed former glory.
A great deal of money and effort is coming out of especially Saudi Arabia as part of the da'wa to persuade gullible infidels that not only did the Qur'an accurately predict all future science and technology, from creation theory to automobiles, but that Islam is thoroughly modern. Some perceptive Muslims have noted, however, that this whole approach risks making the validation of the Qur'an dependent upon the discoveries of science.
Under this high-stakes approach, several adverse scientific findings could do almost as much damage as the discovery of Hugh's postulated Syriac Ur-Qur'an in some dusty basement corner.
Posted by: MBR at August 31, 2007 12:49 AM
"The cyclically confused, depressed and elated Ziauddin Sardar, also prominent in this area of "Islamic science" currently seems in a negative space, quite pessimistic about Islam's chances of ever regaining claimed former glory."
-- from a poster above
Ziauddin Sardar is a bizarre creature who appears on British television and is even permitted to review books for "New Scientist" and "Nature" on the always-comical subject of something called "Islamic science" or "the history of Islamic science." He was particularly fascinating when, while reviewing Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu's "history of Islamic science" he not only accepted but elaborated upon Ihsanoglu's absurd explanations (excuses) as to why, in Islam, certain advances -- such as clocks, which would have come in handy for telling, when it was the exact time for wudu and then those Meccatropic prostrations, five times a day -- had never occurred, and had to be borrowed from the Infidel West.
at August 31, 2007 1:43 AM
#1. "Pakistan is reverberating with the call of jihad. Taliban-style militias are spreading rapidly out from provinces in the far north-west. The danger to the country and to the rest of the world is escalating." --from an article by Ziauddin Sardar for the New Statesman
From the Archives on Ziauddin Sardar:
"His [Ziauddin Sardar's] autobiographical "Desperately Seeking Paradise" was described as "enchanting" by Jonathan Dimbleby...-- from a reader
Would that be the Jonathan Dimbleby, or his execrable father, who was such a constant promoter of Arafat and the PLO back in the 1970s? I'm not surprised that a Dimbleby should find the autobiography of an obvious phony and flake and apologist for Islam like Ziauddin Sardar "enchanting."
For a very revealing example of the sheer craziness that Ziauddin Sardar offers, take a look at his review of Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu's apologist history of Islamic science, that attempts to explain away the last thousand years of non-achievement -- look especially at how Ziauddin Sardar seconds the bizarre explanation by Ihsanoglu of why the Muslims, who after all needed accurate time-keeping for their five canonical prayers, never managed to develop time-pieces as happened in the Western world (see David Landes on the development of time-keeping in the Western world).
Bizarre, is Sardar. And even more bizarre is the fact that the reputable magazine "Nature" allowed Ziauddin Sardar to publish this review of Ihsanoglu's apologist history of "Islamic" science.
#2. In a New Statesman article of 6th Feb. 2006 Ziauddin Sardar wrote:
"Then there was this from Will Hutton in the Observer: Islam is 'predominantly . . . pre-Enlightenment'. This statement has several layers of ignorance. It projects Islam "predominantly" as monolithic. It suggests that being "pre-Enlightenment" is inferior to being post-Enlightenment. It assumes that "Islam" and "Enlightenment" have nothing to do with each other - as if the European Enlightenment emerged out of nothing, without appropriating Islamic thought and learning. It betrays an ignorance of postmodern critique that has exposed Enlightenment thought as Eurocentric hot air. And, of course, it frames Muslims as "pre-Enlightenment" irredeemable barbarians."
Read the full article by Ziauddin Sardar, one of those who are able, without the slightest irony, to write such stuff: "as if the European Enlightenment emerged...without appropriating Islamic thought and learning." What Islamic thought? What Islamic learning?
#3. Ziauddin Sardar, a Muslim who pushes the line about the Great Achievements of Islam in Science, and who hews to a slightly-less obvious version of the Muslim cant about how "all of subsequent science is to be found in the Qur'an" -- an extraordinary belief that ought to disqualify anyone from being taken seriously in the advanced West, much less be allowed to review books having to do with "Islam and Science" in Nature and The New Statesman (as Ziauddin Sardar has been allowed to do).
Here's a good comment from British science writer Lewis Jones:
01/23/2006
Science Allah Carte
"Muslim science? On the face of it, it seems as incongruous as Christian physics or Jewish oceanography. But can Islam plead a special case? A popular element along these lines has always been Islam's historical track record. When Ziauddin Sardar published his thoughts on the subject in New Scientist almost a quarter of a century ago, he titled his article, not "Can science come to Islam?" but "Can science come back to Islam?"
In the words of F.R. Rosenthal (The Classical Heritage of Islam): "Islamic rational scholarship, which we have mainly in mind when we speak of the greatness of Muslim civilization, depends in its entirety on classical antiquity . . . Islamic civilization as we know it would simply not have existed without the Greek heritage."
Ibn Warraq, author of Why I Am Not a Muslim, points out: "Islamic science was founded on the works of the ancient Greeks, and the Muslims are important as the transmitters of Greek (and Hindu) learning that may well have been lost otherwise" (Aristotle, Plato, Galen, Hippocrates, Archimedes, Euclid, Ptolemy). And even so, "most of the translators were Christian."
Warraq writes: "There is a persistent myth that Islam encouraged science. Adherents of this myth quote the Koran and hadith [traditional sayings of Muhammad] to prove their point . . . 'Seek knowledge, in China if necessary'; 'The search after knowledge is obligatory for every Muslim.' This is nonsense, because the knowledge advocated in the previous quotes is religious knowledge. Orthodoxy has always been suspicious of 'knowledge for its own sake,' and unfettered inquiry is deemed dangerous to the faith. . . . All sciences are blameworthy that are useless for acting rightly toward God."
"Those who kill do not think they are committing any crime," said Girija Shankar Jaiswal (a lawyer who argues cases for victimized women). "They think they are becoming martyrs. They do not mind going to jail."
Al-Hasan ibn al-Haytham was one of the greatest scientists of medieval Islam, and his "Optics" strongly influenced Kepler. The French philologist Ernest Renan wrote: "A disciple of Maimonides, the Jewish philosopher, relates that he was in Baghdad on business, when the library of a certain philosopher (who died in 1214) was burned there. The preacher, who conducted the execution of the sentence, threw into the flames, with his own hands, an astronomical work of Ibn al-Haitham, after he had pointed to a delineation therein given of the sphere of the earth, as an unhappy symbol of impious Atheism."
One is reminded of the nineteenth century English politician John Morley, discussing the life of Voltaire: "Where it is a duty to worship the sun, it is pretty sure to be a crime to examine the laws of heat."
In the twelfth century Averroes studied medicine and philosophy, and his work on Aristotle was responsible for the development of the inductive, empirical sciences. His reward was to be tried as a heretic, condemned, and exiled. Yet his name is often put forward as being at the forefront of the Islamic history of science.
Renan begged to differ: "To give Islam the credit of Averroes and so many other illustrious thinkers, who passed half their life in prison, in forced hiding, in disgrace, whose books were burned and whose writings almost suppressed by theological authority, are as if one were to ascribe to the Inquisition the discoveries of Galileo, and a whole scientific development which it was not able to prevent."
There is also a current line of thought that assumes Islamic science has been "hijacked" by fundamentalists, and that all ills can be conveniently attributed to them. But shifting the burden of anti-science to an isolated hard-core fundamentalist group evades the central issue. Taslima Nasreen had a government warrant issued for her arrest in Bangladesh (for "outraging religious feelings"), and has some experience of official Muslim displeasure. "I don't find any difference between Islam and Islamic fundamentalists," she says. ". . . I need to say that, because some liberals always defend Islam and blame fundamentalists for creating problems."
In New Scientist (15 December 2001), Ziauddin Sardar reported: "One particular study, sponsored by the International Federation of Institutes of Advanced Studies (IFIAS) in Stockholm brought together Muslim scientists and scholars worldwide in seminars held between 1980 and 1983. The IFIAS study, published as The Touch of Midas, concluded that the issue of science and values in Islam must be treated within a framework of concepts that shape the goals of a Muslim society."
Sardar also reports that the early 1990s brought a shift into obscurantism by the defenders of Muslim science: "it began to be argued that all knowledge, including scientific knowledge, could be found in the Koran. This thesis received a tremendous boost from the well-funded Saudi project, Scientific Miracles in the Qur'an (Koran). The project spanned both empirical work, involving comparisons of those verses of the Koran that deal with astronomy and embryology with the latest discoveries, and popularizations through conferences and seminars. Relativity, quantum mechanics, big bang theory, embryology-practically everything was 'discovered' in the Koran."
In summary: "science becomes not a problem-solving enterprise or objective enquiry, but a mystical quest to understand the Absolute. Conjecture and hypothesis have no real place; all enquiry must be subordinate to the mystical experience."
Nor are there any visible prospects that there will even be open debate in print on the subject. It is a numbing thought that there does not exist a single secular Arabic periodical. In any case, debates that revolve around the concept of heresy are unlikely to lead anywhere worth reaching.
"The idea of the sacred is quite simply one of the most conservative notions in any culture, because it seeks to turn other ideas-uncertainty, progress, change-into crimes." Those are the words of Salman Rushdie in his Herbert Reade Memorial lecture in February of 1990, while in hiding from a fatwa for blasphemy."
Ziauddin Sardar is a more sophisticated and better educated Defender of the Faith, but as Lewis Jones notes, when Ziauddin Sardar published a piece in New Scientist almost a quarter of a century ago, he titled his article not "Can science come to Islam?" but "Can science come back to Islam?"
In other words, Ziauddin Sardar at this point would not dare to suggest directly that all of modern physics and biology can be found in the Qur'an, knowing perfectly well he would be laughed out of the court of public opinion. But he still maintains, even as he denounces those who, by straightforwardly making such claims, cause damage to the "image" of Islam and, as important, to the standing and professional well-being of Ziauddin Sardar and all those like him busily defending and protecting Islam as best they can, as reality keeps breaking in and Infidels begin, horrifically for people like Ziauddin Sardar to wake up and start to inform themselves, and do so not because there is some vast Western conspiracy to blacken the name of Islam, but only because the behavior of some Muslims themselves in Dar al-Islam and Dar al-Harb, and the obvious support given to that behavior by many other Muslims, and finally the obvious nonsense and lies that the Defenders of the Faith indulge in, even when they purport to be the good guys, the reformers, the people who want, as Hasan Suroor wants, an end to "denial" but does not go nearly far enough, goes only so far as to do what he can to protect the image of Islam and to avoid talking about the deep and possibly immutable problem that a Total Belief-System, predicated on a state of permanent hostility or war between Believers and Infidels, poses to all those Infidels -- who, it might be added, comprise 85% of the world's population.
Muslims themselves, through their behavior, have made it impossible to ignore the texts, tenets, attitudes, and atmospherics of Islam which do all the damage to the "image" of Islam that could possibly be done. Nothing Infidels say or do has anything to add to what Muslims themselves say and do. All Infidels are now doing is looking, less naively, at reality, and with growing understanding the more they connect the dots from, say, southern Thailand to southern Sudan to southern Nigeria to bombs that go off in metros in Madrid and London, and murders that are committed in Amsterdam and Beslan and Moscow and Toronto, and connect the dots between all of these, and the other dots -- the Money Weapon deployed to pay for mosques, and madrasas, and propaganda, and to silence all Infidel critics by threats of litigation, and to pay for armies of Western hirelings, and the campaigns of Da'wa that target the psychically and economically marginal in Infidel societies, and finally, the demographic conquest that is spoken and written about so openly, so enthusiastically, by Muslims in public (see Boumedienne at the U.N. in 1974, about the future conquest of Europe by the forces of Islam not through military might but through the "wombs of Muslim women"; see the letters pages of Muslim newspapers such as the English-language "Dawn" in Pakistan), and on Muslim websites everywhere.
Posted by: Hugh
at August 31, 2007 1:48 AM
I read this, (and some of the links) with interest, although I admit not great understanding, as I speak english and french only, with just a very few phrases of arabic and no aramaic (but I went to mass in a Maronite church in Beirut about 12 years ago and they say their mass in aramaic which was cool because of course that was the language of jesus). I travelled for work to manya bunch of muslim countries (as a canadian engineer it was mostly the francophone ones like Liban, Tunisie & Maroc but also Saudi Arabie which I absolutely loathed).
Hugh mentioned that the book by "Christoph Luxenberg" has an english translation. Does he have any details (publishing house etc). Is there also a translation in french?
Yhank you
Posted by: Questioning_Always at August 31, 2007 2:41 AM
From Robert Irwin's "Dangerous Knowledge: Orientalism and Its Discontents," an excellent tour d'horizon of Western Islamic scholarship (pp. 270-271):
"... the deconstructive approaches of Noth, Wainsborough, Cook, Crone, and others remain extremely controversial and continue to be opposed by large numbers of Orientalists working in the same field. Because of the possible offence to Muslim susceptibilities, Western scholars who specialize in the early history of Islam have to be extremely careful what they say and some of them have developed subtle forms of double-speak when discussing contentious matters."
So far have we progressed.
Posted by: Papa Whiskey at August 31, 2007 2:49 AM
Hugh-
We can only hope.
Salman Rushdie's exposure of the other great and equally-fatal flaw -which utterly undermines the Koran's validity (the so-called "satanic verses") was somehow never quite made as earthshakingly clear by him (and the book is too dense and obscure for it to be evident to the unscholarly reader) as it needed to have been.
Khomeini understood it, which is why he issued a murder fatwa.
Rushdie appeared to tone down what was his deathblow to the sanctity of the Koran's "perfect" transmission once he was running for his life (while his Japanese translator lost his).
The "satanic verses" are the same argument against a "divine" Koran as the Yemeni fragments, etc.: -Mohammad accepted the devil's words as divine at least once.
Which would lead a healthy mind to ask: why not twice?
Or a hundred times?
Or EVERY TIME?
(Except the "satanic verses" themselves, perhaps?)
-Hoping Hollywood has one backbone in stock and takes up your "DaKorani Code" high concept.
(If you need a collaborator...)
Posted by: profitsbeard at August 31, 2007 2:55 AM
It is published by Hans Schiler and is available here: http://www.verlag-hans-schiler.de/?title=Christoph_Luxenberg_The_Syro_Aramaic_Reading_of_the_Koran&art_no=M0088&language=en&cart=M0088&val=40
Posted by: molly at August 31, 2007 3:07 PM
Mohamed Arkoun in his book La Pensee Arabe [Paris: PUF- Que sais-je?] writes that up until the 10th century at least an older and/or alternate version of the Qur'an was kept in a mosque, in Iraq I believe. So there's a Muslim admission that there was an earlier, different version than that used today.
By the way, what do the Yemeni fragments have to do with Luxenberg? Anything? Nothing substantial?
How about the long article in the Atlantic Monthly about 10 years ago on the original version of the Quran? Does that article have anything to do with Luxenberg?
Posted by: Eliyahu at September 1, 2007 6:17 PM
"By the way, what do the Yemeni fragments have to do with Luxenberg? Anything? Nothing substantial?
How about the long article in the Atlantic Monthly about 10 years ago on the original version of the Quran? Does that article have anything to do with Luxenberg?" (from above)
Not clear from that January 1999 subscriber-only piece by Toby Lester. A few brief extracts from a very long article give some clues, nothing more:
"The first person to spend a significant amount of time examining the Yemeni fragments, in 1981, was Gerd-R. Puin, a specialist in Arabic calligraphy and Koranic paleography based at Saarland University, in Saarbrcken, Germany. Puin, who had been sent by the German government to organize and oversee the restoration project, recognized the antiquity of some of the parchment fragments, and his preliminary inspection also revealed unconventional verse orderings, minor textual variations, and rare styles of orthography and artistic embellishment. Enticing, too, were the sheets of the scripture written in the rare and early Hijazi Arabic script: pieces of the earliest Korans known to exist, they were also palimpsests-versions very clearly written over even earlier, washed-off versions. What the Yemeni Korans seemed to suggest, Puin began to feel, was an evolving text rather than simply the Word of God as revealed in its entirety to the Prophet Muhammad in the seventh century A.D.[...]
To date just two scholars have been granted extensive access to the Yemeni fragments: Puin and his colleague H.-C. Graf von Bothmer, an Islamic-art historian also based at Saarland University. Puin and Von Bothmer have published only a few tantalizingly brief articles in scholarly publications on what they have discovered in the Yemeni fragments. They have been reluctant to publish partly because until recently they were more concerned with sorting and classifying the fragments than with systematically examining them, and partly because they felt that the Yemeni authorities, if they realized the possible implications of the discovery, might refuse them further access. Von Bothmer, however, in 1997 finished taking more than 35,000 microfilm pictures of the fragments, and has recently brought the pictures back to Germany. This means that soon Von Bothmer, Puin, and other scholars will finally have a chance to scrutinize the texts and to publish their findings freely-a prospect that thrills Puin. "So many Muslims have this belief that everything between the two covers of the Koran is just God's unaltered word," he says. "They like to quote the textual work that shows that the Bible has a history and did not fall straight out of the sky, but until now the Koran has been out of this discussion. The only way to break through this wall is to prove that the Koran has a history too. The Sana'a fragments will help us to do this." [...]
In 1996 the Koranic scholar Gnter Lling wrote in The Journal of Higher Criticism about "the wide extent to which both the text of the Koran and the learned Islamic account of Islamic origins have been distorted, a deformation unsuspectingly accepted by Western Islamicists until now." [...]
Gerd-R. Puin's current thinking about the Koran's history partakes of this contemporary revisionism. "My idea is that the Koran is a kind of cocktail of texts that were not all understood even at the time of Muhammad," he says. "Many of them may even be a hundred years older than Islam itself. Even within the Islamic traditions there is a huge body of contradictory information, including a significant Christian substrate; one can derive a whole Islamic anti-history from them if one wants." [...]
GERD-R. Puin speaks with disdain about the traditional willingness, on the part of Muslim and Western scholars, to accept the conventional understanding of the Koran. "The Koran claims for itself that it is 'mubeen,' or 'clear,'" he says. "But if you look at it, you will notice that every fifth sentence or so simply doesn't make sense. Many Muslims-and Orientalists-will tell you otherwise, of course, but the fact is that a fifth of the Koranic text is just incomprehensible. This is what has caused the traditional anxiety regarding translation. If the Koran is not comprehensible-if it can't even be understood in Arabic-then it's not translatable. People fear that. And since the Koran claims repeatedly to be clear but obviously is not-as even speakers of Arabic will tell you-there is a contradiction. Something else must be going on." "
at September 2, 2007 2:33 AM
Thanks MBR - fascinating.
Since Hugh and Ibn Warraq both praise the book, I thought it worth looking into. (Thanks Molly for posting the link to the publisher - seems we can buy an English copy via paypal on the site). Yet I am a little concerned that, although the implications of this work might be profound, the book itself might be too technical or dull to be worth buying. Does anyone have a copy?
Posted by: dlp at September 2, 2007 7:50 AM
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