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

THE QUR’AN IN RECENT SCHOLARSHIP
Qur’an originally consisted in part of Christian strophic hymns used as liturgy by
the Christians of Mecca (the existence of whom had generally been denied in
traditional scholarship). According to Lüling, Muhammad himself grew up as a
member of one such Christian community (perhaps Ebionites or other Jewish-
Christians?) before breaking with others who espoused trinitarian doctrines; he
redacted their liturgical texts to expunge trinitarian concepts and form the Qur’an
text we now know. 17 Lüling’s method consisted in part of making small (and
sometimes not so small) changes in the textus receptus of the Qur’an to “restore”
the “Ur-Qur’anic” passages to their supposedly original Christian content. But
to many this method seems capricious and guided by a desire to prove the hypothesis
he is asserting. Nonetheless, his work is full of interesting insights of many
kinds; it has, however, never received the kind of full and open examination it
deserved. It was subjected to a conspiracy of silence in Germany for many years,
and while some scholars outside of Germany took note of it, few were sufficiently
comfortable with German to wrestle with Lüling’s often long-winded and
complex argumentation.
I have made my own contribution to the question of what the religious message
of the “Ur-Qur’an” may have been. 18 In my view, the Qur’an clearly refers to its
target audience as mu’minun, “Believers” or “the Faithful” – not as Muslims –
and seems to be preaching strict monotheism and rigorous observance of God’s
revealed law as key components of being a Believer. The Qur’an also makes clear
that “peoples of the book,” that is, Christians and Jews, if they are sufficiently
righteous, may be counted among the Believers. That is, the Believers’ movement
seems at first to have been a strictly monotheist but non-confessional pietistic
movement that could, and did, include some Christians and Jews. In articulating
this hypothesis, I attempted to draw implications and deductions from the text
of the Qur’an itself, even if they run counter to the interpretation given to these
passages by later Islamic tradition, which takes pains to disguise the early
participation of Christians and Jews in the Believers’ movement out of which
Islam crystallized during the Umayyad period. So my hypothesis falls somewhere
between the Christian-influence and Jewish-influence schools, since in my view
the influence of both religions (or maybe of Jewish Christianity, as numerous
scholars have recently suggested) 19 is likely to have been significant from a very
early time.
Luxenberg’s Die Syro-Aramäische Lesart clearly belongs to that strand of
scholarship that focuses on Christian influences in the “Ur-Qur’an.” Like Lüling,
(whom he nowhere mentions, although it is inconceivable that he did not know
his work), Luxenberg adjusts or “corrects” the reading of numerous Qur’an
passages to arrive at the “Ur-Qur’anic” version, but, as compared to Lüling, his
method seems somewhat more systematic and objective: he first isolates passages
that pose syntactic or other difficulties, and then considers whether reading them
as transcriptions of Syriac words or phrases brings a better sense to the passage.
In some cases he also resorts to the hypothesis that the earliest script in which the
“Ur-Qur’an” was written employed writing conventions that were subsequently
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