What the Koran Really Says
From Neoredemptive
| What the Koran Really Says: Language, Text, and Commentary | |
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Ibn Warraq (ed)
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Synopsis
A collection of essays seeking to apply the same forms of historic and critical textual analysis to the Koran that have been applied to the Hebrew and Christian scriptures (the Old Testament and New Testament) for over a century, and to explore the relationship between the results of those studies and the traditional accounts of the early history of Islam.
Doc's Take
Fascinating.
Modern textual criticism has been both a challenge and a boon to Christian orthodoxy. On the one hand, much work was conducted with faulty tacet assumptions, like the "miracle stories" of the two Testaments being nothing more than fanciful story-telling; since flawed premises produce flawed conclusions, the resulting flood of liberal revisionism had little to do with the pursuit of truth and much to do with a desire to gut and de-claw Christianity and replace it with a more timid and agreeable beast that would not challenge modern lusts. On the other hand, excellent scholarly work with early Hebrew and Greek manuscripts has led to better renditions of the texts themselves (better approximations of the "original autographs") and improved exegesis of the texts themselves, not to mention a wealth of knowledge concerning the culture and history of the Hebrew and Christian cultures.
My experience of Islamic apologists would have led me to believe that no such scholarship was either necessary or possible with the text of the Koran -- that it had been written and preserved in perfect Arabic, unaltered since the time of its recitation by Muhammad, perfectly and unambiguously intelligible and "clear" to anyone learned in the syntax and grammar of Arabic. This book decimates that notion with a long series of essays discussing the myriad problems with the Koranic texts as we have them today, not the least of which being the diacritic marks and vowels of modern Koranic editions which simply did not exist as features of written Arabic at the time of the recitations. But let's not be unnecessarily narrow; even if we grant the vowels and diacritics were inserted correctly (which many do not), there are ample early testimonies and textual traditions pointing out copyist errors in early editions of the Surrahs, there is the "problem" of countless deviant readings and orderings existing at least up until the time of the Uthmanic redaction, there was ongoing debate in the first Islamic centuries as to which script and which notational devices should be used when writing the Koran (undecorated rasms and diacritics, verse separators, enumeration of Surrahs and the verses each contained, etc). And then there are the problems of the text's incomprehensibility introduced by some undetermined combination of copyist error, words transliterated from non-Arabic (and even non-Semitic) languages, and a long tradition of commentaries which ascribe meanings to passages for which there is no credible lexical or linguistic justification.
The book is highly technical, and if you don't have a stomach for the finer points of higher textual criticism and Semitic exegesis and language studies, I don't expect you will enjoy it or get much out of it. The critical matters of Koranic hermeneutics -- particularly the doctrine of abrogation -- receive very little treatment, and they are probably of far more interest to the informal scholar than the details of the scripts and manuscripts of the Koranic texts.
Wiktionary
We can see the kinds of exegetical problems this book talks about playing out wherever Islamic topics are discussed in the English-speaking world. For example, see how the word "jihad" is being handled over at Wiktionary.
The claim in Noun, definition 2, of wiktionary:jihad (permalink) is:
After the Prophet and his authorized Companions, no individual or group or state has the right to wage war against any non-Muslim country for the propagation of Islam. Now Jihad, or Qital to be precise, can be done by an Islamic state only for the purpose of ending oppression. -4:75 Qur’an
But one wiktionary:Talk:jihad contributor sees this as a misleading interpretation of 4:75 (permalink):
Again under the "Noun" section in "jihad" <http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/jihad>, the verse taken from the Qur'an doesn't comply with the authentic translation of Abdullah Yusuf Ali, which I give from http://www.islam101.com/quran/yusufAli/QURAN/4.htm : And why should ye not fight in the cause of Allah and of those who, being weak, are ill-treated (and oppressed)?- Men, women, and children, whose cry is: "Our Lord! Rescue us from this town, whose people are oppressors; and raise for us from thee one who will protect; and raise for us from thee one who will help!"
