Christian/Muslim ThreadsThe Quran is fabricated and corruptedChicken Coward Chicken Coward http://www.islamic-awareness.org/Quran/ ... yem1b.html http://www.islamic-awareness.org/Quran/ ... yem1a.html http://www.islamic-awareness.org/Quran/ ... yem1c.html http://www.islamic-awareness.org/Quran/ ... yem1d.html http://www.islamic-awareness.org/Quran/ ... r1605.html (From the Vatican Library) http://www.islamic-awareness.org/Quran/Text/Mss/APerg2.html (Australian National Library) http://www.islamic-awareness.org/Quran/ ... ayt1a.html http://faculty.washington.edu/wheelerb/quran/maili.html http://www.islamic-awareness.org/Quran/ ... cairo.html http://www.islamic-awareness.org/Quran/ ... em12a.html http://www.islamic-awareness.org/Quran/ ... em12b.html http://www.islamic-awareness.org/Quran/ ... em12c.html http://www.islamic-awareness.org/Quran/ ... yt12a.html http://www.islamic-awareness.org/Quran/ ... em12c.html http://www.islamic-awareness.org/Quran/ ... eters.html Letters to the Editor The Atlantic Monthly 77 North Washington Street Boston, MA 02114 December 30, 1998 To the Editor, As a convert to Islam with a background in academic religious studies, it was with great excitement and enthusiasm that I opened your January 1999 cover article "What is the Koran?" by Toby Lester. It seems clear that much of Muslim theology has stagnated into a dry legalism over the last few centuries, as represented by the famous phrase "closing the doors to ijtihad". "Ijtihad" refers to the interpretation of the Qur’an. (The phrase is famous among Muslims, and is central to understanding many issues facing contemporary Muslims, but this was not mentioned by the author.) And so, I approached the article anticipating an exciting exploration. However, I was very disappointed. It clearly exhibited a confused understanding of some aspects of Muslim thought-- including statements that were simply misleading-- and a confusion between two interesting topics: the history of the Qur’an and the interpretation of the Qur’an. In addition, Lester makes use of references that are out of print and/or written by self-proclaimed antagonists to Islam. In other words, there is no way to check many of the author’s major references, and some of them are clearly bigoted-- not academic. First, the problematic references. Lester refers to the seemingly authorless The Origins of the Koran. This lapse in attribution is understandable given that this collection of essays is edited by none other than the infamous, pseudonymous "Ibn Warraq" author of Why I am Not a Muslim. This earlier work cannot be described as anything resembling valid academic scholarship, as I show with my online review... "Warraq" articulated his purpose in writing this earlier book: "This book is first and foremost an assertion of my right to criticize everything and anything in Islam-- even to blaspheme." One can only assume his goals have remained unchanged, and one can only question the validity of such types of writing. Indeed, one of his own references in that earlier book distanced herself in no uncertain terms from his misrepresentation of her work. I had a personal conversation with Dr. Ann Elizabeth Mayer at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania regarding "Warraq’s" reference to some of her work. She was quite clear in disdainfully classifying "Warraq" as a hate-monger, not a legitimate academic. Details are available at the web address listed above. Similar problems abound with reference to the works of Patricia Crone-- neither of which are in print. Also out of print are the books by John Wansbrough referenced in the article. Given this, I have to question Lester’s assertion that anyone "engaged in the critical study of the Koran today must contend with Wansbrough’s two main works..." (emphasis mine) Am I to assume there are so few people engaged in such study that two such seminal works cannot be kept in print? Or at least, that there is no recent work based on Wansbrough’s books the author could have referenced? Were there no mainstream authors or current works to reference that the diligent student could easily obtain for him or herself? In the beginning of the article Lester discusses issues that would involve the possibility of a historical development to the Qur’anic text that continued after Muhammad’s death. At the end of the article, however, it appears the topic has changed to issues related to the interpretation of the Qur’anic text-- as that text’s history is currently understood. In both arenas, the article raised for me more questions than it answered. Questions pertaining to the author’s grasp of both topics. They are not the same. The general and usual understanding of the historicity of the text is that the Qur’an is a collection of Muhammad’s utterances at discreet, identifiable times over a period of about twenty-three years. A proper understanding must then always refer back to the historical context, situation, or questions being asked by his contemporaries at the time of each "incident of revelation." In that sense, Muslims have always understood the Qur’an as being bound by history, time, place, and context. (There is absolutely no similarity between the Muslim understanding of the process of this alleged revelation and a Christian understanding of revelation by "verbal inspiration" as is stated by the author.) It is known and accepted among Muslims that there are several versions of the Qur’anic text. These variations have to do with differing diacritical marks, and do not seem to significantly effect meaning. It is also alleged that two or three copies of the original ‘Uthmanic recension of the Qur’an still exist. To my best understanding, one is in Turkey and perhaps two in the old Soviet Union. It would have been helpful for the author to mention these variations and texts and how they may or may not relate to the discovery of the Yemeni texts. Are the Yemeni textual variations simply among the known and accepted readings of the Qur’an? Do they differ from the texts alleged to be ‘Uthmanic? Or are these completely new, hitherto unknown variations? (That would indeed be significant!) In other words, which "standard Koranic text" is Lester discussing and comparing with the Yemeni texts, exactly? We do not know, and have thus failed to actually learn much of anything. Lester’s discussion of orthodoxy in Islam seems highly problematic, in that technically Islam has no priestly caste within which resides interpretative authority. In other words, who’s "orthodoxy" is the author referencing? Shi’a? Sunni? Wahabi? Sufi? We don’t know. It may be safe to assume the author is prey to the common misconception that Muslim thought is one huge monolithic entity as defined by the classical ulema and their ideological descendants. It isn’t. And had the author read or referenced any of the varieties of Sufi theology he would know that metaphorical interpretations of the Qur’an are alive and well and quite popular among many, many Muslims. In an article that attempts such detailed analysis, it was very disturbing to find two errors in the presentation of the basics of Islamic thought. The author defines "sunna" as "the body of Islamic social and legal custom." This is incorrect. Sunnah is the example of Muhammad-- communicated both through the hadith literature and the practical example of the living Muslim community. Shariah, or Muslim Law, is the body of social and legal customs and behaviors. While the Shariah is partially derived from what is considered to be the sunnah of Muhammad, it also incorporates several methods, such as use of analogy, to apply that example to various situations. This appears to be a significant error on the part of the author. Another error is found in a quote from Gerd-R. Puin who questions the Qur’anic self- description of being "clear" when "every fifth sentence or so simply doesn’t make sense". This was shocking to me from an academic studying the Qur’an, for the Qur’an is quite explicit that some verses of the text are clear in meaning, but some are not clear in meaning. (Surah 3: Ayat 7) Indeed, Muhammad Asad, in his masterful and contemporary English commentary on the Qur’an states that this passage "may be regarded as a key to understanding the Qur’an" and yet Puin seems to have completely ignored it in his assessment of the intelligibility of the Qur’an-- and clearly misleads with his statement on the issue of clarity. One can only question the validity of Puin’s grasp of and awareness of the text. In addition, on the same point, Qur’anic Arabic is not the same as Modern Arabic. Are some of the sentences "incomprehensible" to Puin and others today because of a loss of ancient meanings and words due to the natural development of spoken Arabic? We don’t know, this important issue is not even mentioned. Additional errors, or at least statements open to question, are made by the author in his understanding of the status of a translated Qur’an, the "doctrine" of abrogation, the understanding of what is actually done with Islamic symbols in Rushdie’s Satanic Verses, and a number of other not-so-minor points that need not be detailed here. Suffice it to say that this article has failed to deliver a substantive report on the issues facing contemporary Muslims as they begin to look at the foundational text of their religious tradition in a fresh, contemporary way, and has failed to communicate the actual significance of the discovered Yemeni texts. I must refer your interested readers to a fascinating recent work surveying contemporary Muslim debates on the interpretation of the Qur’an (though not on the allegations of a significant post-Muhammadan historical development of the text) by Daniel Brown entitled Rethinking tradition in Modern Islamic Thought (ISBN 0 521 570778). Sincerely, Jeremiah D. McAuliffe, Jr., Ph.D. eMail: alimhaq[at]city-net.com Jeffrey Lang said: I think it extremely irresponsible and unprofessional of the Atlantic Monthly to assign such a weighty project to a young, unqualified writer. Toby Lester has virtually no education in Islamic studies. The magazine cites only his two years in the Peace Corps in Yemen and his two years as a refugee-affairs officer for the UN in the West Bank as his sole qualifications. This would be like assigning an article on developments in modern Biblical criticism to a visiting foreign Muslim student to the US or to a recent Muslim immigrant who has virtually no exposure to scholarly Christian thought. This may explain why this article is so devoid of depth and substance and also why I have very few comments on it. Lester frames his article around the recent discovery in Yemen of ancient codices of the Quran. He implies that these parchments will somehow cause a radical revision among Muslim and non-Muslim scholars in how they view the Quran and that they may undermine Muslim confidence in their scripture. For instance, he quotes R. Stephen Humphrey's opinion that such a discovery may delegitimize the whole historical experience of the Muslim community. Lester's only source on the contents of this discovery and the principle authority upon which his article depends is Gerd-R Puin, who has been involved in the restoration of the manuscripts. Although Puin is an expert in Arabic calligraphy and text preservation, he is by no means a scholar Of Islam. Puin betrays both his provincialism and ignorance of Islam when he discusses the Muslim reluctance to equate translations of the Quran with the Quran. The Muslim position is that the Quran is the original revelation received by Prophet Mohammed in his native Arabic and that any rendition of it in another language is not, technically speaking, the Quran, but merely an interpretation of it, since it does not equate the original revelation and because something is inevitably lost in translation, no matter how well done. Nevertheless, interpretations of the Quran have been produced by Muslim scholars in all major languages. In his confusion, Puir concocts the absurd fiction that Muslims refuse to produce renditions of the Quran in other languages because the scripture is incomprehensible and hence untranslatable. Puir has the foolishness to make this statement when just two lines earlier in Lester's article, he's quoted as saying that concerning his belief that the Quran is incomprehensible, many Muslims-and Orientalists-will tell you otherwise. The utter inanity of Puir's thinking is shocking. On the one hand he states that Muslims do not produce renditions of the Quran in non-Arabic (which is false) because it is incomprehensible, while on the other hand he admits that Muslims-and many Orientalist-believe the Quran is comprehensible. Therefore, to follow Puir's logic, we would conclude that Muslims are reluctant to translate the Quran because of its incomprehensibility of which they are completely unaware. This is like saying, Johnny refuses to cross the street because of a car that he thinks is not coming. In his article, Lester also refers to some conjectures and theories of a few Western Quranic scholars, such as Crone, Cook, and Wansbrough, who, as the author himself indicates, have lost credibility among the majority of their Western colleagues in Islamic studies. It thus seems that the writer is struggling to create a sensation out of a suspect and minority movement in modern Western Islamic studies. In the last page of his article, Lester implies that several modern Muslim writers and scholars, including Fazlur Rahman, Muhammad Abdu, Taha Hussein, Nasr Abu Zaid and Mohammad Arkoun, are among those who have come to question the integrity of the Quran. While it is true that each of these writers offered non-traditional approaches and interpretations of their scripture, and some of them met public outcry against their ideas, none of them, as the author seems to imply, has questioned the integrity of the Quran. Finally, it should be mentioned that the article's alarmist tone concerning the discovery of the Yemeni manuscripts seems totally uncalled for. Lester admits that so far the manuscripts show some unconventional verse orderings, minor textual variations, and rare styles of orthography and artistic embellishment. However, the past existence of such manuscripts is well known to Muslims and those that did not completely agree with the Uthmanic text were eliminated in various ways. The recovery of an ancient manuscript dating back to the earliest history of Islam that differs in minor ways from the Uthmanic text and that was eliminated from circulation will hardly cause Muslims to feel the need to rewrite their history; if anything, it will only confirm it for them.
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