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

RECONSTRUCTING THE QUR’AN
claim of Jewish-Christian source materials underlying certain passages of the
Qur’an. This material, so Lüling justly presupposes, cannot simply have been an
oral transmission. There must have been some literary form from which it ultimately
derived. Whether this form was in Coptic is a more dubious point. Lüling’s
assumption of a massive Christian presence in central and northwestern Arabia
also cannot be substantiated. 25 Yet there can be no doubt that Christianity, in some
form and to some extent, had arrived in the Hijaz and the environs of Mecca by
Muhammad’s lifetime. In addition, it had a firm foothold in the regions of the
Arabian peninsula bordering on Iraq, Syria and Palestine, was entrenched across
the Red Sea in Ethiopia, and had major seats in al-Hira in Iraq and Najran in
Yemen. The Meccan merchants, and with them Muhammad, thus had ample
opportunity to encounter Christians within the Arab environment.
The lectionary of Luxenberg
Where Lüling leaves off, Luxenberg begins his attempt to decode the language of
the Qur’an with a highly ambitious approach. His findings, first published in 2000,
but now available in a revised and enlarged second edition of 2004, 26 created
quite a stir in the media and spawned a number of sensation-seeking articles in
the popular press. That initial publication, however, has given new impulse to the
study of the Qur’an in more scholarly venues because of the startling conclusions
that the author drew from his analysis. Taken as a whole, his conclusions dismiss
the entire edifice of Muslim Qur’an commentary as irrelevant and imply that
all extant copies of the Qur’an, whether ancient or modern, include major and
myriad misreadings. Luxenberg’s monograph is both narrowly philological in
method and broadly speculative in its conclusions. He operates in the splendid
isolation of purely philological intuitions, but disregards any form of historical–
critical analysis. The results of his research provide many plausible new readings
of the text, but very few of his conclusions carry the resounding ring of genuine
certitude. In addition, Luxenberg consistently disregards the scholarly accumulation
of almost two centuries of Qur’anic textual criticism and excuses this disregard
with a profession of academic purity, namely that he thereby avoids being
influenced by previous studies.
Based on his inquiry of obscure Qur’anic passages, Luxenberg seeks to prove
that the consonantal text of the ‘Uthmanic version was misread by the early
generations of Muslims who were no longer aware that the language of the
Qur’an was profoundly influenced by Syriac. To recapture the substratum of
Syriac in the Arabic of the present-day Qur’an, the author diminishes the role of
oral tradition in the transmission of the Arabic Qur’an, changes diacritical marks
and occasionally even alters the skeleton of the consonantal text, and rifles
the Chaldean dictionary for Syriac roots – albeit with scarce attention to their
historical usage. This results in some astonishing readings, some of which appear
plausible at times, as when elegant solutions are suggested for Qur’anic phrases
that experts have been unable to render with certitude. Instances would include,
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