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

RECONSTRUCTING THE QUR’AN
produced a mixed language, one which blended Arabic with Syriac in such a
fashion that almost a third of the Qur’an’s content forms a textual layer derived
from Syriac. This hybrid Qur’anic language, which Luxenberg assumes to be
a reflection of the Meccan dialect of the time, also included loanwords from a
variety of other sources and can be traced, in particular, in the Meccan suras of
the present day Qur’an.
Furthermore – and this is decisive for Luxenberg’s argument – after
Muhammad’s death the true meaning of this hybrid language was forgotten in
what must have been an astonishingly wide-spread loss of memory in the Muslim
world. Later generations, familiar only with Arabic but no longer with Syriac, and
scribes, whose ancestors had left the Hijaz to live in the conquered areas of the
Fertile Crescent, were unable to understand the original mixed language and
recorded the Qur’an in the classical type of Arabic in which we have it today. The
gradual disappearance of a knowledge of Syriac among Muslim Arabs began
in the reign of ‘Abd al-Malik (685–705) when Syriac was replaced by Arabic as
the official written language for the administration of the Umayyad empire.
Luxenberg further asserts that the Arabic script offers only an image of a
language but cannot help us determine whether this scriptural image was also
spoken. Because of the widespread loss of memory and consequent disappearance
of Syriac in the Muslim world, the oral conveyance of the Qur’an was cut short.
Given this interruption in the process of transmission, Muslim exegesis of
the Qur’an never operated authentically because it could not base itself on the
original formulation of the Holy Book.
This pessimistic assessment of the adequacy of oral tradition in the transmission
of the Qur’an from the time of Muhammad to that of the fixation of the written
text, allows Luxenberg to claim enormous freedom in emending the Qur’anic text.
With passages he deems obscure or in need of repair, he is free to move and
remove diacritics or invert the sequence of letters within a word by metathesis or
graft different vowels on a penstroke (mater lectionis), in order to make Arabic
words fit the Syriac roots he has in mind. By assuming a complete break in
the oral transmission of the Qur’an, Luxenberg can assert the primacy of a
hypothetical text, one written in the rudimentary form of an Arabic ductus
without diacritical dots, a text that he claims enshrines a layer of Syriac equivalent
to 30 percent of the text. Unfortunately, this postulated text of the Holy Book
cannot be documented by a single manuscript, either in whole or in part.
The scenario of Azzi
Behind Luxenberg stands a French work by Joseph Azzi published in 2001 that
was preceded by a number of publications in Arabic issued under a pseudonym. 33
Azzi’s book resuscitates the question of a possible link between the Qur’an and
one form of Jewish-Christianity, known as the Ebionites. This link with Ebionite
Christianity has pre-occupied scholarship since the times of A. von Harnack and,
later, Hans-Joachim Schoeps, who both focused on possible Jewish-Christian
79