Scholars Scrutinize the Koran's Origin
A Promise of Moist Virgins or Dried Fruit? New York Times (and
International Herald Tribune), March 4, 2002
Scholars Are Quietly Offering New Theories of the Koran By
ALEXANDER STILLE
To Muslims the Koran is the very word of God, who spoke through
the Angel Gabriel to Muhammad: "This book is not to be doubted,"
the Koran declares unequivocally at its beginning. Scholars and
writers in Islamic countries who have ignored that warning have
sometimes found themselves the target of death threats and
violence, sending a chill through universities around the world.
Yet despite the fear, a handful of experts have been quietly
investigating the origins of the Koran, offering radically new
theories about the text's meaning and the rise of Islam.
Christoph Luxenberg, a scholar of ancient Semitic languages in
Germany, argues that the Koran has been misread and
mistranslated for centuries. His work, based on the earliest
copies of the Koran, maintains that parts of Islam's holy book
are derived from pre- existing Christian Aramaic texts that were
misinterpreted by later Islamic scholars who prepared the
editions of the Koran commonly read today.
So, for example, the virgins who are supposedly awaiting good
Islamic martyrs as their reward in paradise are in reality "white
raisins" of crystal clarity rather than fair maidens.
Christoph Luxenberg, however, is a pseudonym, and his scholarly
tome The Syro-Aramaic Reading of the Koran had trouble finding a
publisher, although it is considered a major new work by several
leading scholars in the field. Verlag Das Arabische Buch in
Berlin ultimately published the book.
The caution is not surprising. Salman Rushdie's Satanic Verses
received a fatwa because it appeared to mock Muhammad. The
Egyptian novelist Naguib Mahfouz was stabbed because one of his
books was thought to be irreligious. And when the Arab scholar
Suliman Bashear argued that Islam developed as a religion
gradually rather than emerging fully formed from the mouth of the
Prophet, he was injured after being thrown from a second-story
window by his students at the University of Nablus in the West
Bank. Even many broad-minded liberal Muslims become upset when
the historical veracity and authenticity of the Koran is
questioned.
The reverberations have affected non-Muslim scholars in Western
countries. "Between fear and political correctness, it's not
possible to say anything other than sugary nonsense about Islam,"
said one scholar at an American university who asked not to be
named, referring to the threatened violence as well as the
widespread reluctance on United States college campuses to
criticize other cultures.
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. "The Muslims have
the benefit of hindsight of the European experience, and they
know very well that once you start questioning the holy
scriptures, you don't know where it will stop," the scholar
explained.
The touchiness about questioning the Koran predates the latest
rise of Islamic militancy. As long ago as 1977, John Wansbrough
of the School of Oriental and African Studies in London wrote
that subjecting the Koran to "analysis by the instruments and
techniques of biblical criticism is virtually unknown."
Mr. Wansbrough insisted that the text of the Koran appeared to
be a composite of different voices or texts compiled over dozens
if not hundreds of years. After all, scholars agree that there is
no evidence of the Koran until 691 — 59 years after Muhammad's
death — 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.
In 1977 two other scholars from the School for Oriental and
African Studies at London University — Patricia Crone (a
professor of history at the Institute for Advanced Study in
Princeton) and Michael Cook (a professor of Near Eastern history
at Princeton University) — suggested a radically new approach in
their book Hagarism: The Making of the Islamic World.
Since there are no Arabic chronicles from the first century of
Islam, the two looked at several non-Muslim, seventh-century
accounts that suggested Muhammad was perceived not as the founder
of a new religion but as a preacher in the Old Testament
tradition, hailing the coming of a Messiah. Many of the early
documents refer to the followers of Muhammad as "hagarenes," and
the "tribe of Ishmael," in other words as descendants of Hagar,
the servant girl that the Jewish patriarch Abraham used to father
his son Ishmael.
In its earliest form, Ms. Crone and Mr. Cook argued, the
followers of Muhammad may have seen themselves as retaking their
place in the Holy Land alongside their Jewish cousins. (And many
Jews appear to have welcomed the Arabs as liberators when they
entered Jerusalem in 638.)
The idea that Jewish messianism animated the early followers of
the Prophet is not widely accepted in the field, but "Hagarism"
is credited with opening up the field. "Crone and Cook came up
with some very interesting revisionist ideas," says Fred M.
Donner of the University of Chicago and author of the recent book
Narratives of Islamic Origins: The Beginnings of Islamic
Historical Writing. "I think in trying to reconstruct what
happened, they went off the deep end, but they were asking the
right questions."
The revisionist school of early Islam has quietly picked up
momentum in the last few years as historians began to apply
rational standards of proof to this material.
Mr. Cook and Ms. Crone have revised some of their early
hypotheses while sticking to others. Mis-translated possibility:
Seventy-two dark-eyed virgins await in Paradise "We were
certainly wrong about quite a lot of things," Ms. Crone said.
"But I stick to the basic point we made: that Islamic history did
not arise as the classic tradition says it does."
Ms. Crone insists that the Koran and the Islamic tradition
present a fundamental paradox. The Koran is a text soaked in
monotheistic thinking, filled with stories and references to
Abraham, Isaac, Joseph and Jesus, and yet the official history
insists that Muhammad, an illiterate camel merchant, received the
revelation in Mecca, a remote, sparsely populated part of Arabia,
far from the centers of monotheistic thought, in an environment
of idol-worshiping Arab Bedouins. Unless one accepts the idea of
the angel Gabriel, Ms. Crone says, historians must somehow
explain how all these monotheistic stories and ideas found their
way into the Koran.
"There are only two possibilities," Ms. Crone said. "Either
there had to be substantial numbers of Jews and Christians in
Mecca or the Koran had to have been composed somewhere else."
Indeed, many scholars who are not revisionists agree that Islam
must be placed back into the wider historical context of the
religions of the Middle East rather than seeing it as the
spontaneous product of the pristine Arabian desert. "I think
there is increasing acceptance, even on the part of many Muslims,
that Islam emerged out of the wider monotheistic soup of the
Middle East," says Roy Mottahedeh, a professor of Islamic history
at Harvard University.
Scholars like Mr. Luxenberg and Gerd- R. Puin, who teaches at
Saarland University in Germany, have returned to the earliest
known copies of the Koran in order to grasp what it says about
the document's origins and composition. Mr. Luxenberg explains
these copies are written without vowels and diacritical dots that
modern Arabic uses to make it clear what letter is intended. In
the eighth and ninth centuries, more than a century after the
death of Muhammad, Islamic commentators added diacritical marks
to clear up the ambiguities of the text, giving precise meanings
to passages based on what they considered to be their proper
context. Mr. Luxenberg's radical theory is that many of the
text's difficulties can be clarified when it is seen as closely
related to Aramaic, the language group of most Middle Eastern
Jews and Christians at the time.
For example, the famous passage about the virgins is based on
the word hur, which is an adjective in the feminine plural
meaning simply "white." Islamic tradition insists the term hur
stands for "houri," which means virgin, but Mr. Luxenberg insists
that this is a forced misreading of the text. In both ancient
Aramaic and in at least one respected dictionary of early Arabic,
hur means "white raisin."
Mr. Luxenberg has traced the passages dealing with paradise to a
Christian text called Hymns of Paradise by a fourth-century
author. Mr. Luxenberg said the word paradise was derived from the
Aramaic word for garden and all the descriptions of paradise
described it as a garden of flowing waters, abundant fruits and
white raisins, a prized delicacy in the ancient Near East. In
this context, white raisins, mentioned often as hur, Mr.
Luxenberg said, makes more sense than a reward of sexual favors.
In many cases, the differences can be quite significant. Mr.
Puin points out that in the early archaic copies of the Koran, it
is impossible to distinguish between the words "to fight" and "to
kill." In many cases, he said, Islamic exegetes added diacritical
marks that yielded the harsher meaning, perhaps reflecting a
period in which the Islamic Empire was often at war.
A return to the earliest Koran, Mr. Puin and others suggest,
might lead to a more tolerant brand of Islam, as well as one that
is more conscious of its close ties to both Judaism and
Christianity.
"It is serious and exciting work," Ms. Crone said of Mr.
Luxenberg's work. Jane McAuliffe, a professor of Islamic studies
at Georgetown University, has asked Mr. Luxenberg to contribute
an essay to the Encyclopedia of the Koran, which she is editing.
Mr. Puin would love to see a "critical edition" of the Koran
produced, one based on recent philological work, but, he says,
"the word critical is misunderstood in the Islamic world — it is
seen as criticizing or attacking the text."
Some Muslim authors have begun to publish skeptical, revisionist
work on the Koran as well. Several new volumes of revisionist
scholarship, The Origins of the Koran, and The Quest for the
Historical Muhammad, have been edited by a former Muslim who
writes under the pen name Ibn Warraq. Mr. Warraq, who heads a
group called the Institute for the Secularization of Islamic
Society, makes no bones about having a political agenda. The
actual reward in paradise: White raisins "Biblical scholarship
has made people less dogmatic, more open," he said, "and I hope
that happens to Muslim society as well."
But many Muslims find the tone and claims of revisionism
offensive. "I think the broader implications of some of the
revisionist scholarship is to say that the Koran is not an
authentic book, that it was fabricated 150 years later," says
Ebrahim Moosa, a professor of religious studies at Duke
University, as well as a Muslim cleric whose liberal theological
leanings earned him the animosity of fundamentalists in South
Africa, which he left after his house was firebombed.
Andrew Rippin, an Islamicist at the University of Victoria in
British Columbia, Canada, says that freedom of speech in the
Islamic world is more likely to evolve from within the Islamic
interpretative tradition than from outside attacks on it.
Approaches to the Koran that are now branded as heretical —
interpreting the text metaphorically rather than literally — were
widely practiced in mainstream Islam a thousand years ago.
"When I teach the history of the interpretation it is
eye-opening to students the amount of independent thought and
diversity of interpretation that existed in the early centuries
of Islam," Mr. Rippin says. "It was only in more recent centuries
that there was a need for limiting interpretation."
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