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

FRED M. DONNER
about theology and religion would have looked to Aramaic for stock technical
terms and phrases – indeed, they may have first become familiar with these
religious concepts from speakers of Aramaic – and that, as with legal English,
some of those borrowed phrases would include the relevant markers of Aramaic
grammatical constructions. So we cannot, I think, sweepingly dismiss Luxenberg’s
reconstructions of what we might call “unrecognized” Syriac phrases in the
Qur’an text. Rather, each of his proposed reconstructions needs to be examined
on its own merits. While some reviewers have harshly criticized a few of his
emendations, the majority of them remain to be tested. 51 Given what we know
about the religious history of the Near East in the seventh century, and given the
manifest uncertainty about just how the Qur’an text was first written and about its
linguistic content, Luxenberg’s basic hypothesis, that the “Ur-Qur’an” contained
elements of Syriac phraseology, certainly seems to me highly plausible and
deserving of further study.
4 How was the presumed “Ur-Qur’an” transmitted?
We have already touched on some of the questions regarding the early
transmission of the “Ur-Qur’an” text and how it may have become the Qur’an we
know today. There seems to be general agreement that in the passage from
“Ur-Qur’an” to the Qur’an text familiar to us now, some editing was performed,
but whether it was editing merely to make the text reflect unambiguously a wellestablished
recitation, or whether the editing completely transformed the text,
intentionally or unintentionally, is still subject to debate.
A central question regarding the transmission of the Qur’an is whether this
transmission was essentially written or oral. (This is a distinct subject from the
question of the Qur’an’s original orality, discussed earlier.) Islamic tradition
argues that the Qur’an’s transmission was firmly controlled by the practice of oral
recitation; the revelations received by Muhammad were learned from him as
recitations by his followers, and were sometime later written down to form the
Qur’an text we have today. These traditional accounts usually revolve around the
stories of the so-called ‘Uthmanic recension or vulgate of the Qur’an prepared at
the orders of the third caliph, ‘Uthman ibn ‘Affan (d. 35/656). The doctrine of the
“ ‘Uthmanic recension” was long accepted by a number of Western scholars as
well, and with it the belief in an unbroken tradition of oral recitation. 52
Doubts have been shed, however, on this traditional view. Burton, de Prémare,
and many others have emphasized the suspect character of the traditional reports
about the ‘Uthmanic recension. 53 Moreover, there is mounting evidence that the
Qur’an text, or parts of it at least, must at some stage in its history have been
transmitted in purely written form, without the benefit of a controlling tradition
of active recitation. 54 This evidence takes the form of recognizing in the Qur’anic
text misunderstood words, hypercorrected words (the “lectio facilior”), or stray
marks which then became incorporated into the recitation, something that could
only happen if the oral recitation were derived from the written text rather than
the other way around. Luxenberg’s “Syriac” hypothesis, which posits that editors
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