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

DEVIN J. STEWART
reckless methodology, wayward philology, and exegetical caprice. He faults
Luxenberg for not citing a number of important earlier studies in the field,
including works by Goldziher, Aryeh Levin on imala, and Ullman’s dictionary of
classical Arabic (WKAS). 10 These are all valid points, but one must guard against
over-reaction. One senses that such statements are in part an expression of the
need to guard professional turf. Many scholars in the field are bothered by the fact
that the author is an amateur, not a professional scholar with proper credentials in
Arabic and Islamic studies. It bears keeping in mind, however, that amateurs can
produce important results, and that the work should be judged on its own merits
rather than being dismissed summarily. After all, Michael Ventris was an amateur,
yet his brilliant decipherment of Linear B indeed represented a revolution in the
study of ancient Greek, and Schliemann, for all his eccentricities, did make
fantastic discoveries at Troy and Mycenaea.
Another source of indignation, however, is simply the feeling that to emend the
text of the Qur’an is an act of enormous hubris. Lurking behind this sentiment is
a sensitivity to popular Islamic reverence for the Qur’an and attendant claims that
it is God’s eternal speech, that its continuous oral transmission has prevented its
textual corruption or modification, that it does not include significant variants,
that there are no significant disputes as to its integral text, and that it contains no
contradiction. Such attitudes, while they accurately reflect what Muslim youth are
taught at home or at the local mosque, do not hold up when examined in the light
either of western critical scholarship or of traditional Islamic scholarship on the
Qur’an, which involves a great deal of sophisticated, detailed, and insightful
philological and historical criticism of the Qur’anic text. In particular, the reviewers
have not shown awareness of the extent to which emendation has played a role in
traditional or modern scholarship on the Qur’an.
Critical reviews of Luxenberg’s work have not been entirely satisfactory.
Certainly, they make valid points. Luxenberg is to be faulted for not taking
adequate account of relevant scholarship to date, and in some cases it is clear that
he has ignored or merely pushed aside certain widely accepted results without
presenting any cogent argument for doing so. He may also be faulted for following
his indicated procedures for detecting the “Syro-aramaic” reading of the text in a
rather mechanical fashion. For some reason, both he and his reviewers Phenix and
Horn take this as a positive point, thinking that it shows philological rigor—when
the truth is far from it. However, reviews of his work have been somewhat disappointing
in that they focus primarily on general methodological issues and do not
say enough about the actual textual emendations and interpretations the work
presents. All told, Luxenberg proposes hundreds of emendations to the text of the
Qur’an, and the reviews address only a handful. The most detailed review, with
regard to emendation, is that of Corriente. The majority of Luxenberg’s proposed
emendations thus remain untested; scholars have not responded to them directly.
Several investigators of the Qur’an have argued convincingly that the Qur’an is
not immune to human error and that the oral tradition of Qur’anic recitation has
not miraculously preserved the text from corruption. 11 They also observe that the
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