The Qur'an in its historical context (pdf - Islam and Christian-Muslim ...

GABRIEL SAID REYNOLDS
beginning. It is thus extremely doubtful if our generation will see the
completion of a really critical edition of the Qur’an.
(A. Jeffery, “The textual history of the Qur’an,” 103) 22
With this Jeffery gave up any remaining hopes for the project. When he died in
1959 the project died with him. 23 Presumably, it can only have been Spitaler who
informed Jeffery of the archive’s destruction. Indeed, over two decades later
Spitaler himself commented that the destruction of the archive in the war meant
the end of the project for a critical edition of the Qur’an. 24
And yet it is now well known that the archive survived the war, that Spitaler
took possession of it and that he passed it on to his former student, now a
Professor in Berlin, decades later. 25 Spitaler’s conduct in this affair recently led
Günter Lüling, another of his former students – and later a personal nemesis – to
malign him. Lüling suggests that Spitaler did not himself have the ability to do
any productive work with the films, and was too competitive to allow others
access to them. 26
This is certainly an unfair assertion; it is presumably a polemical response to
Spitaler’s well known opposition to Lüling. It seems more likely that Spitaler
simply did not believe in the feasibility of the Bergsträsser/Pretzl/Jeffery project.
Spitaler alludes in one place to his belief that even Pretzl began to doubt the
possibility of producing a critical edition of the Qur’an. 27 Indeed, in a presentation
delivered to the twentieth International Congress of Orientalists in Brussels
(1938), Pretzl notes the degree to which readings of the Qur’an had been
suppressed over time, “sodass heute fast nur mehr die Lesung das Hafs ‘an
‘Asim bekannt und gebraucht ist.” 28 He continues: “Aus diesen Tatsachen ergibt
sich die Schwierigkeit, im nicht zu sagen Unmöglichkeit, an einen Urtext
heranzukommen.” 29
However, Pretzl’s pessimism was above all in regard to the value of the Islamic
transmission of variants (since there is reason to suspect that most variants are the
product of exegesis). In the same presentation Pretzl enthusiastically supports
Jeffery’s work towards an apparatus criticus of the Qur’an. He also notes the hard
work already done towards the project (“der sich okzidentalische Gelehrte seit
längerer Zeit mit Eifer und Selbstentsagung widmen.”), 30 even as he adds a
remarkable note about a promised contribution of Eastern, presumably Muslim,
scholars to it: “Es wäre zu wünschen, dass auch orientalische Gelehrte ihr
Versprechen der Mitarbeit an diesen grossen wissenschaftlichen Aufgaben
einlösen würden.” 31
In the end we can do no more than speculate about the true intentions of Pretzl
or Spitaler, and speculation is no ground for judgment. Yet this much is clear: that
Jeffery – a Qur’an scholar without equal – was unable to follow this project
through was not only a disappointment for him. It was a great loss for all students
of the Qur’an, a loss that perhaps can never be fully redeemed.
In any case, as a result of the untimely deaths of Bergsträsser and Pretzl, and
of the peculiar actions of Spitaler, the only coordinated effort to produce a critical
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