from The Northern Lights
History and the Holy Koran - Pt 2
by Barry Cooper
Professor Cooper is the author of numerous books and essays in political science. He is the editor of several volumes of the Collected Works of Eric Voegelin. This essay appears in New Political Religions, or An Analysis of Modern Terrorism, University of Missouri Press, Columbia, Missouri, 2004. It appears as an appendix and the references are to chapters in the main volume. This is published with permission of the publisher. This is the second of two parts.
Today, for Muslims living within Islamic history, matters are made worse when the inquiring minds are also Western and so doubly damned as both infidel and formerly or neo-colonial. For Westerners derailed by dogmatic postcolonial, postmodern sensibilities, things are no better: there can be no serious distinction between scholarship and polemic for postmoderns because there are no inquiring minds. There are only interested minds. Or, as Michel Foucault once put it, there is no knowledge, only power-knowledge. Notwithstanding the unpropitious context for the appearance of a mind inquiring into the text-critical problems of the Koran, or into what the Koran "really says," a good deal of the traditional understanding has been radically revised by the past generation of scholars — inquiring Muslim and non-Muslim minds working in the area of Middle Eastern studies — to give as neutral a designation as possible. Their concerns, to reiterate a point just made, are not with the perverse interpretations of ijtihad nor of the politics of the Ikhwan, though we shall argue that it has political as well as scholarly significance.
Two aspects of the problem concern us. The first deals with recent accounts of the formation of the Islamic community on the basis of what may be termed allegiance to the Islamic vulgate, and second is the textual status of the vulgate documents. The analogous problems in Judaism would consist in the reconciliation of (1) the archeological history of ancient Palestine, which provides a physical record of the gradual historical development of hilltop villagers into a kingdom, which then was conquered and exiled forcibly to Babylon where the "prophets" brought together the theology of the exodus from paganism into monotheism, with (2) the content of this theology, which told the well-known stories of: Yahwe's initial revelation to Moses, the exit from Egypt to Sinai, the episode of the Burning Bush, Yahwe's gift of the Ten Commandments, the wandering in the desert, the conquest of the Promised Land, the Davidic kingdoms, the Babylonian captivity, the revelations of Daniel, and so on.7
The Islamic equivalent to the distinction between the history of the tribal villagers of Palestine and their political life, and the theology of the exodus from paganism, has a similar structure: (1) the revelation at Mecca, the creation of the new community in Medina, the early rightly guided caliphs, their conquests, and the creation of the Umayyad Empire, is an equivalent version of (2) the Israelite exodus under different historical circumstances and experiences. Not humiliation, defeat, and exile, but triumphant imperial succession to Rome and Persia furnished the contents of the Muslim story of exodus from paganism to monotheism.
This multidimensional historical/symbolic complex is far more subtle than the Islamic vulgate, which combines the two dimensions into a single story. Voegelin has given the name historiogenesis to the creation of the compound story that combines an account of "what happened," the res gestae, with a meaning that provides significance to "what happened," in this instance, obedience to the word of God.8
We noted in chapter 4 the elaboration of what might be termed a secular vulgate or secular historiogenetic account by Montgomery Watt. Watt provided a conventionally Western and secular account of the origins of the history of Islam. For present purposes it provides a useful starting point and a contrast to both the Muslim vulgate and a remarkable study, published in 1977 by Patricia Crone and Michael Cook, Hagarism: The Making of the Islamic World. They argued that Islam began as a messianic movement, "Hagarism," the objective of which was to rule the Holy Land in a peculiar kind of alliance with the Jews. The peculiarity, according to Crone and Cook, was that messianic Israelite redemption was conducted by an army with an Ishmaelite genealogy. "There were," they wrote,
really only two solutions. On the one hand they [the proto-Muslim "Hagarenes"] could proceed after the manner of the Ethiopian Christians, that is to say by themselves adopting Israelite descent. But in view of the play they had already made of their Ishmaelite ancestry, it is hardly surprising that they should have clung to it throughout their entire doctrinal evolution. On the other hand, if they would not go to the truth, the truth might perhaps be persuaded to come to them. On the foundation of their Ishmaelite genealogy, they had to erect a properly Ishmaelite prophetology. It was a daring move for so religiously parvenu a nation, but it was the only way out.
The tension between Israelite redemption and Ishmaelite genealogy, to say nothing of the transformation of the exodus symbolism from defeat and humiliation to victory and triumph, was extreme. As John Wansbrough remarked in a celebrated review of Hagarism, "it seems, indeed, that the problem of identity in Islam is not exclusively a legacy of colonialism; it has been there all the time." Wansbrough himself developed his own systematic analysis of Islamic history about the same time. He explicitly applied to the Koran and the story of the Prophet at Mecca and Medina the techniques of biblical criticism developed over the preceding century and a half by Western scholars. He did so, moreover, on the commonsensical (at least to an inquiring Western scholar) grounds that if the Christian and Jewish revelations could be discussed using "source-critical" or "historical-critical" methods, so could the Islamic.9
In addition to a novel approach to Muslim sacred texts, a kind of "critical history" was applied to the early years of the Umayyad Empire. Between the death of the Prophet in 632 and the establishment of an Arab-ruled Islamic empire by the end of the century, the purely pragmatic necessity of establishing the superiority of Islam over the two competing monotheisms, as well as over Zoroastrianism and "paganism" or paganisms, was obvious.10 At the same time, the three religious communities strongly outnumbered the ruling Muslims. In addition, the Umayyad rulers were faced with the need to unify a wide range of traditional legal customs in order to reduce the instability of the eighth century that had led to dynastic wars of succession. The point of this effort to create a coherent "theologico-political" synthesis was to create a civil theology or a "minimum dogma" (to use a formula that Voegelin applied to Spinoza's efforts under similar circumstances).
Starting around 800, commentators and scholars invented Islamic history, or what we have called the historiogenetic myth of Islam, on the basis of "trustworthy authorities" who were alleged to have transmitted faithfully the oral reports of the Prophet during the previous five or six generations. Wansbrough argued the Koran was the finalized version of "an extensive corpus of prophetic logia" drawn from traditional Judaeo-Christian imagery that gained whatever unity the text has by means of a "limited number of rhetorical conventions." In his second book, Wansbrough argued that Muslim practices underwent a similar kind of transformation so that existing ninth-century practices were said to date from the time of the Prophet. These actions by what he called a "clerical elite," that is, the ulema, raised Islam above the other sects — Christian, Jewish, and Zoroastrian — by "neutralizing" Christian Trinitarian doctrine into Muslim unity and attacking Jewish scripture as having been abrogated by successive revelation.11 These Western analyses of the origins of Islam naturally enough provoked considerable controversy both from Muslim traditionalists and from tradition-minded Western Arabists and Orientalists.12 The controversy has redoubled in light of a parallel line of philological analysis focused on the textual history of Muslim scripture.
Let us begin our summary of this issue with a reprise of some agreed-upon historical data. The earliest texts from the Koran date from 691, fifty-nine years after the death of the Prophet. They are inscribed inside the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem and vary slightly from the standard Koran. The third caliph, Uthman ibn Affan (644-656) ordered the hitherto oral text to be set down in writing. This "Uthman recension" was to be authoritative and constitutes the first book in Arabic. It is also widely agreed that the political purpose of the Uthman recension was to ensure that, all over the growing Umayyad Empire, Muslims would make reference to the same text and not quarrel, like the Jews and the Christians, over what the scripture said. At the same time, Uthman ordered all "imperfect" copies of the Koran destroyed.
The original Koranic script, called the rasm, in which the text established by Uthman was written, is without diacritical marks, written as dots, that are used to distinguish various letters and vowels. The diacritical points were added around the turn of the eighth century on orders of Hajjaj bin Uusuf, governor of Iraq (694-714). The result essentially transformed an orally transmitted text into a written one.
Apart from the inscriptions inside the Dome of the Rock, the earliest text of the Koran was, until recently, the Mail Manuscript in the British Library, which dated from the late seventh century; two other manuscripts, one in the Library of Tashkent, in Uzbekistan, and another in Istanbul at the Topkapi Museum, are from the eighth century. In 1972, a number of manuscripts were discovered in the Grand Mosque of Sanaa, in Yemen, during repairs to the loft between the inner and outer roofs following a major rainstorm. They were turned over to Qadhi Ismail al-Akwa, president of the Yemeni Antiquities Authority. A few years later, al-Akwa showed them to Gerd-Rüdiger Puin, a German Arabist and Islamic paleographer at Saarland University. In 1981, Puin and Hans Caspar Graf von Bothman, an Islamic art historian and colleague at Saarland, and Albrecht Noth, of the University of Hamburg, obtained support from Germany to preserve, clean, and restore some fifteen thousand sheets and fragments. It turned out that the Sanaa materials were older than the Mail Manuscript.
The Yemeni authorities did not publicize the find or the work done by the Germans. The Germans said very little either and went about their work, which now included making photocopies. In 1997, von Bothman returned to Germany with 35,000 pictures, some of which were clearly palimpsests, manuscripts containing faint earlier texts that had been erased in order to reuse the parchment at a later date. The political reason for their reticence was obvious. As Puin put it, "So many Muslims have this belief that everything between two covers of the Koran is just God's unaltered word. 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 do this."13
Another German scholar, the pseudonymous Christoph Luxenberg, has drawn additional implications from the Sanaa discovery and from prior philological work by Günter Lüling.14 Lüling reopened an argument that had been made in the nineteenth century by Western Orientalists, that a dialect of Aramaic, namely, Syriac, or Syro-Aramaic, had influenced the vocabulary of the Koran. In the Prophet's time, Syriac was the language of written communication in the Middle East. Equally important, the literature written in Syriac was chiefly Christian. Now, the Koran is filled with biblical references, yet the Prophet was an illiterate merchant. Leaving aside the intervention of Gabriel, this means either that Mecca was home to large numbers of Jews and Christians, and not just pagan Bedouins, as the Islamic tradition maintains, or the Koran was written some place other than Mecca.15
Luxenberg continued his interpretation along the same philological lines as Lüling but drew some even more significant (and controversial) conclusions. Not only was the Koran soaked in Christianity and written in a language that used a large number of Syro-Aramaic words, but the very meaning of the term Koran derives from a Syriac word, qeryana, which is a technical term in Eastern Christianity that means "lectionary," which is to say, a set of liturgical readings taken from the Bible and read aloud at various ritual occasions during the year.16 The method used by Luxenberg is complex and can best be judged over the long term by philologically competent scholars. The short-term implications, as the discussion of the dark-eyed houris above has indicated, are politically very important.
More than the fantasies of recruits to "martyrdom operations" are involved in the revisions to the Koran that follow from Luxenberg's argument. For those living within Islamic history, that is, for the pious Muslim, the Koran was not only transmitted from God to the Prophet without human intervention, but it was communicated in perfect Arabic, a unity of form and style and language and content that is itself a representation of the perfection and unity of God.
Luxenberg's argument simply destroys this account entirely. Not only is the Koran a Christian lectionary, the text itself put together at Uthman's command was compiled by people who could not read the language in which parts of it were written, namely, Syro-Aramaic. That is why they misread the passage about the dark-eyed houris as well as several other ones of much greater theological significance.
Even if scholars know that the questions raised by Westerners such as Luxenberg, or by Lüling, Puin, and von Bothman, or by contemporary Muslim scholars have been raised before in the history of Islam, those previous efforts by inquiring minds have long been forgotten. As a result, the current work is bound to be seen widely as yet another attack by Western scholarship or by apostate Muslim scholars. As with the controversy over the houris, it should come as no surprise that the Luxenberg thesis was not simply critically examined and analyzed according to the conventions of ordinary scholarship, but the argument has been characterized as a "plot against the Qur'an under the guise of academic study and archive preservation."17
Toward the end of her study of the seductive appeals of terrorism, especially of Islamist terrorism, Jessica Stern indicated the challenge to Westerners. Clearly military opposition or a policy change with respect to Israel or Saudi Arabia is not the main issue. Nor is it the simple fact that the cultures and societies and religions of the world provide human beings with many forms of collective identity. "One of our goals," she said, "must be to make the terrorists' purification project seem
less urgent: to demonstrate the humanity that binds us, rather than allow our adversaries to emphasize and exploit our differences to provide a seemingly clear (but false) identity, at the expense of peace."
18 A concern for the common humanity of all people is possible only for inquiring minds, minds in search of a common humanity. In terms of the historical and the theological issues raised in this appendix, such a person would see in Revelation, whether Jewish, Christian, or Muslim, a symbolic, not a literal truth. The alternative would be to capitulate not to Islam but to fundamentalists who have no need to inquire about anything because their impulses no less than their acts lead to totalitarian domination and the superfluousness of humanity itself.
[This is the second of two parts. Part 1 may be read HERE.]
NOTES
(all internet links listed below have been tested as of Jan 2010)
7. See Ahituv, Shmuel,and Oren, Eliezer B. The Origin of Early Israel: Current Debate: Biblical, Historical, and Archaeological Perspectives.The Irene Lev-Sala Seminar. Beer-Sheva: Ben-Gurion University of the Negev Press, 1998.
8. Voegelin, Eric. The Ecumenic Age. Edited by Michael Franz. Vol IV, Order and History. Vol.17 of The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin. Columbia: University of Missouri press, 2000, chap. 1.
9. See Watt, W. Montgomery. Muhammad at Mecca. Oxford: Clarendon, 1953, and Muhammad at Medina. Oxford: Clarendon, 1956; Crone, Patricia and Cook, Michael. Hagarism: The Making of the Islamic World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977.,16; Wansbrough, John."Review of Hagarism," Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 41 (1978),155; Wansbrough, John. Quranic Studies: Sources and Methods of Scriptural Interpretation.Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977; Wansbrough, John. The Sectarian Milieu: Content and Composition of Islamic Salvation History. Oxford: Oxford university Press, 1978. See also Rippin, Andrew.The Quran and Its Interpretive Tradition. Burlington: Ashgate, 2001.
10. See Berkey, Jonathan P. The Formation of Islam: Religion and Society in the Near East 600-1800. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003., chap. 2.
11. Wansbrough, Quranic Studies, op.cit.,1, 47; Wansbrough, The Sectarian Milieu, op.cit.,123-27.
12. See Berg, Herbert. "Islamic Origins Reconsidered: John Wansbrough and the Study of Early Islam." Method and Theory in the Study of Religion 9 (1997),3-22, reprinted in Warraq, Ibn [pseud.], Quest for the Historical Muhammad, 489-509. See also Motzki, Harald. "The Collection of the Qur'an: A Reconsideration of Western Views in Light of Recent Methodological Developments." Der Islam 78 (2001), 1-34.
13. See "A Qur'an Palimpsest from the Sanaa Qur'ans," available at http://www.christoph-heger.de/palimpse.htm; see also Lester, Toby. "What Is the Koran?" Atlantic Monthly, January 1999. http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/199901/koran.
14. Lüling's original work was privately printed in 1974: Über den Urkoran: Ansatze zur Rekonstruktion der vorislamisch-christlichen Strophenlieder im Koran. A second, corrected edition, was published in 1993.(Erlangen: Verlagsbuch-handlung H. Lüling) It was widely ignored until he published two articles in English, "Preconditions for the Scholarly Study of the Koran and Islam, with Some Autobiographical Remarks." Journal of Higher Criticism 3 (1966).and "A New Paradigm for the Rise of Islam and Its Consequences for a New Paradigm for the History of Israel."Journal of Higher Criticism 7 (2000).
15. See Crone, Patricia. Meccan Trade and the Rise of Islam. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987. See also Stille, Alexander."Scholars Dare to Look into Origins of Quran," New York Times, March 2, 2002 and Stille, "Radical New Views of Islam and Origins of the Koran." Silk Road Communications. 2002.
16. Luxenberg, Christoph. Die Syro-aramaeische Lesart des Koran: Ein Beitrag zur Entschlüsselung der Qur'annsprache. Berlin: Das Arabische Buch, 2000.. See also the reviews in the Journal of the Institute for the Secularisation of Islamic Society, http://www.centerforinquiry.net/; and Phenix, Robert R., Jr., and Horn, Corneilia B., "Review." In Hugoye: Journal of Syriac Studies 6 (2003). http://syrcom.cua.edu/Hugoye/Vol6No1/HV6N1PRPhenixHorn.html .
17. See Geissinger, Aisha. "Orientalists Plot against the Qur'an under the Guise of Academic Study and Archive Preservation." Muslimedia, May16-31, 1999. www.muslimedia.com/archives/features99/orientalist.htm. See also Theil,Stefan. "Challenging the Qur'an" Newsweek, July 28, 2003, http://www.newsweek.com/id/57962; Hathout, Maher. "Response to 'Challenging the Quran' Article in Newsweek." iViews, August 4, 2003. http:www.iviews.com/articles/Articles.asp?ref=IV0308-2054; Muslim Public Affairs Council, "The Quran and the Challenge to Newsweek." August 5, 2003. http://www.mpac.org/article.php?id=230#axzz0cYv2HnN9; "Muslim Scholar Refutes Newsweek Qur'an Article," Palestine Chronicle, August 5, 2003.
18. Stern, Jessica. Terror in the Name of God: Why Religious Militants Kill. New York: HarperCollins, 2003., 280.
