Radical New Views ...

[Dave Monroe]

>From Alexander Stille, "Radical New Views of Islam and
the Origins of the Koran," NY Times, Saturday, March
2nd, 2002 ...

To Muslims the Koran is the very word of God, who
spoke
through the Angel Gabriel to Muhammad: "This book is
not to be doubted," the Koran declares unequivocally
at its beginning. Scholars and writers in Islamic
countries who have ignored that warning have sometimes
found themselves the target of death threats and
violence, sending a chill through universities around
the world. 

Yet despite the fear, a handful of experts have been
quietly investigating the origins of the Koran,
offering radically new theories about the text's
meaning and the rise of Islam. 

Christoph Luxenberg, a scholar of ancient Semitic
languages in Germany, argues that the Koran has been
misread and mistranslated for centuries. His work,
based on the earliest copies of the Koran, maintains
that parts of Islam's holy book are derived from
pre-existing Christian Aramaic texts that were
misinterpreted by later Islamic scholars who prepared
the editions of the Koran commonly read today.

[...]

Christoph Luxenberg, however, is a pseudonym, and his
scholarly tome ""The Syro-Aramaic Reading of the
Koran" had trouble finding a publisher, although it is
considered a major new work by several leading
scholars in the field. Verlag Das Arabische Buch in
Berlin ultimately published the book. 

The caution is not surprising....

[...]


While scriptural interpretation may seem like a remote
and innocuous activity, close textual study of Jewish
and Christian scripture played no small role in
loosening the Church's domination on the intellectual
and cultural life of Europe, and paving the way for
unfettered secular thought....

[...]

... As long ago as 1977, John Wansbrough of the School
of Oriental and African Studies in London wrote that
subjecting the Koran to "analysis by the instruments
and techniques of biblical criticism is virtually
unknown." 

Mr. Wansbrough insisted that the text of the Koran
appeared to be a composite of different voices or
texts compiled over dozens if not hundreds of years.
After all, scholars agree that there is no evidence of
the Koran until 691 - 59 years after Muhammad's death
-when the Dome of the Rock mosque in Jerusalem was
built, carrying several Koranic inscriptions. 

These inscriptions differ to some degree from the
version of the Koran that has been handed down through
the centuries, suggesting, scholars say, that the
Koran may have still been evolving in the last decade
of the seventh century. Moreover, much of what we know
as Islam - the lives and sayings of the Prophet - is
based on texts from between 130 and 300 years after
Muhammad's death.

[...]

... many scholars who are not revisionists agree that
Islam must be placed back into the wider historical
context of the religions of the Middle East rather
than seeing it as the spontaneous product of the
pristine Arabian desert. "I think there is increasing
acceptance, even on the part of many Muslims, that
Islam emerged out of the wider monotheistic soup of
the Middle East," says Roy Mottahedeh, a professor of
Islamic history at Harvard University.

[...]

Scholars like Mr. Luxenberg and Gerd- R. Puin, who
teaches at Saarland University in Germany, have
returned to the earliest known copies of the Koran in
order to grasp what it says about the document's
origins and composition. Mr. Luxenberg explains these
copies are written without vowels and diacritical dots
that modern Arabic uses to make it clear what letter
is intended. In the eighth and ninth centuries, more
than a century after the death of Muhammad, Islamic
commentators added diacritical marks to clear up
the ambiguities of the text, giving precise meanings
to
passages based on what they considered to be their
proper context. Mr. Luxenberg's radical theory is that
many of the text's difficulties can be clarified when
it is seen as closely related to Aramaic, the language
group of most Middle Eastern Jews and Christians at
the time.

[...]

In many cases, the differences can be quite
significant. Mr. Puin points out that in the early
archaic copies of the Koran, it is impossible to
distinguish between the words "to fight" and "to
kill." In many cases, he said, Islamic exegetes added
diacritical marks that yielded the harsher meaning,
perhaps reflecting a period in which the Islamic
Empire was often at war. 

A return to the earliest Koran, Mr. Puin and others
suggest, might lead to a more tolerant brand of Islam,
as well as one that is more conscious of its close
ties to both Judaism and Christianity. 

[...]

Some Muslim authors have begun to publish skeptical,
revisionist work on the Koran as well....

[...]

But many Muslims find the tone and claims of
revisionism offensive....

[...]

Andrew Rippin, an Islamicist at the University of
Victoria in British Columbia, Canada, says that
freedom of speech in the Islamic world is more likely
to evolve from within the Islamic interpretative
tradition than from outside attacks on it. Approaches
to the Koran that are now branded as heretical -
interpreting the text metaphorically rather than
literally - were widely practiced in mainstream Islam
a thousand years ago....

http://www.nytimes.com/2002/03/02/arts/02ISLA.html?ex=1016088694&ei=1&en=dfe78f36367c4f21

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