Robert Spencer said that Islam can not be reformed until the Koran itself is reformed. Muslims say that’s impossible because the Koran is the verbatim transcript of the word of Allah as transmitted to Mohammed, his prophet.
But is that really true? Is the Koran we see today the actual recitals of Mohammed?
Let’s look at the facts.
Mohammed was born in 570 CE in what today is Saudi Arabia. At the age of 40, he began having visions and hearing voices telling him he was the messenger of Allah. Until his death in 632, he regularly received revelations through the Angel Gabriel.
Now Mohammed was illiterate. He couldn’t read or write so his words or ‘recitations’ – or what is known as – ‘Quran’ were memorized by his followers. This is in keeping with Arabic culture which has an oral tradition rather a written one. Muslim tradition also mentions that there were scribes who were responsible for writing down these memorized recitations. Mohammed’s revelations were written down on palm leaves, pieces of bone, or whatever was handy at the time.
It wasn’t until after Mohammed’s death that his words were ‘codified’ into a written book known today as the Koran. Muslim sources give different accounts of this process.
At the battle of Yamama (633 CE), six months after the death of the Prophet, a number of Muslims, who had memorized the Quran were killed. Hence it was feared that unless a written official copy of the Quran were prepared, a large part of revelation might be lost. So, Mohammed’s successor, Abu Bakr, ordered a text to be compiled and compared with the memorized text.
Now let’s go back a few hundred years to the First Council of Nicaea, held in Nicaea, Turkey convoked by the Roman Emperor Constantine I in 325. Anyone who has read the DaVinci Code knows that this Council had the responsibility of sifting through hundreds of gospels, letters and other writings on Jesus and his life. Constantine, tired of al the bickering on the different interpretations of Christianity, ordered the Catholic Bishops to codify the one and only ‘New Testament’.
That’s same codification process took place in Islam.
Othman, the third Caliph, ordered a leading Muslim scribe, to head a team to examine all written and oral records. There work was to yield a complete and accurate account of Allah’s word.
All other texts and oral accounts were ordered destroyed. This Othman Quran, was unanimous approved by the whole Muslim world. Muslims claim that an error even of a single alphabet in transcribing the Quran, the Qurra (memorizers of the Quran) which totaled in the tens of hundreds would have caught it right away and correct it.
But Dr. Gustav Weil has another view.
In consequence of the multiplied variations which had crept into the readings of the Koran, Othman had caused all the different copies which could be found to be collected together and burnt, excepting one, which alone, sanctioned by his own authority, he directed all believers to receive as the only genuine transcript of the revelations of the prophet. Moreover, he confided the editorship and revision of this new and authentic edition to those men who were the most devoted to him, rather than to those who were the most learned.
But what we have here is the problem of the fallacies of memory and the cultural dictates of the time as grist for what is known as the Koran today. But faith and religions organized around that faith see no problem in the cultural intrusions into a belief system. AKA: not eating pork – Muslim and Jew, not killing cows – Hindu, etc.
Are you getting the picture? Perhaps, the Koran we have today is not truly the words of Mohammed and earlier versions or sources, if they were ever studied, might shed light on the problem.
Guess what. There may be such a source.
January 12th, 2008, the Wall Street Journal published a lengthy report entitled , “The Lost Archives” by Andrew Higgins on the early Muslim archives, allegedly destroyed in an April, 1944 British air bombing of a Bavarian Academy of Science in Munich that housed these treasured scholarly documents. The story behind how these archives came to Germany and their status during the Nazi regime has elements of Indiana Jones, the Da Vinci Code and the ODESSA files. The archives were never destroyed, and were secreted by an Arabic scholar and translator, Anton Spitaler, who was liaison to Nazi sponsored Waffen SS battle units composed of Middle East Arabs sponsored, in part, by the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Amin al Husseini, Hitler’s house guest in Berlin during WWII.
Some Koranic critics, notably the pseudonymous scholar “Ibn Warraq”, claim that Professor Angelika Neuwirth, the archive’s custodian, has denied access to scholars who stray from the traditional interpretation.
Public pressure may finally be brought to bear to throw open to Islamic scholars and not simply handed over to Islamic clerics for ’safekeeping’ Safekeeping akin to that of the biblical ark of the covenant buried in an Army Intelligence depot at the end of the original Spielberg film, “Raiders if the Lost Ark”. It may take a decade or more to both catalog and review these documents. Doubtless, fatwas was will be issued upon release of interim analyses of what surfaces from this process, as the Koran appears to be redacted by many writers over many years and includes both Christian and Jewish sources in languages like Syriac-Aramaic, which may explain the ‘72 raisins’ interpretation according to one German philologist expert at the “Christoph Luxenburg”.
What other redactions will be found once the archives are released? When they are, scholars could put the Koran under the same scrutiny that the Bible has gone through and in the end give those Muslims who truly believe in peace to have a tool in reforming the Koran.
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1 user commented in " Winds of War: Can The Koran Be Reformed? "
Follow-up comment rss or Leave a TrackbackThe clerics don’t care about Koran. Its hadith they care about. Uthman was a companion of the prophet. The hadith was compiled centuries after Muhammad and its that that represent the Islamic sects. Each have their ownhadiths and Sira, meaning hadiths and biographies of Muhammad.
Schacht asserts that hadiths, particularly from Muhammad, did not form, together with the Qur’an, the original bases of Islamic law and jurisprudence as is traditionally assumed. Rather, hadiths were an innovation begun after some of the legal foundation had already been built. “The ancient schools of law shared the old concept of sunna or ‘living tradition’ as the ideal practice of the community, expressed in the accepted doctrine of the school.” And this ideal practice was embodied in various forms, but certainly not exclusively in the hadiths from the Prophet. Schacht argues that it was not until al-Shafi`i that ‘sunna’ was exclusively identified with the contents of hadiths from the Prophet to which he gave, not for the first time, but for the first time consistently, overriding authority. Al-Shafi`i argued that even a single, isolated hadith going back to Muhammad, assuming its isnad is not suspect, takes precedence over the opinions and arguments of any and all Companions, Successors, and later authorities. Schacht notes that:
Two generations before Shafi`i reference to traditions from Companions and Successors was the rule, to traditions from the Prophet himself the exception, and it was left to Shafi`i to make the exception the principle. We shall have to conclude that, generally and broadly speaking, traditions from Companions and Successors are earlier than those from the Prophet.
Based on these conclusions, Schacht offers the following schema of the growth of legal hadiths. The ancient schools of law had a ‘living tradition’ (sunna) which was largely based on individual reasoning (ra’y). Later this sunna came to be associated with and attributed to the earlier generations of the Successors and Companions. Later still, hadiths with isnads extending back to Muhammad came into circulation by traditionists towards the middle of the second century. Finally, the efforts of al-Shafi`i and other traditionists secured for these hadiths from the Prophet supreme authority.
Goldziher maintains that, while reliance on the sunna to regulate the empire was favoured, there was still in these early years of Islam insufficient material going back to Muhammad himself. Scholars sought to fill the gaps left by the Qur’an and the sunna with material from other sources. Some borrowed from Roman law. Others attempted to fill these lacunae with their own opinions (ra’y). This latter option came under a concerted attack by those who believed that all legal and ethical questions (not addressed by the Qur’an) must be referred back to the Prophet himself, that is, must be rooted in hadiths.These supporters of hadiths (ahl al-hadith) were extremely successful in establishing hadiths as a primary source of law and in discrediting ra’y. But in many ways it was a Pyrrhic victory. The various legal madhhabs were loath to sacrifice their doctrines and so they found it more expedient to fabricate hadiths or adapt existing hadiths in their support. Even the advocates of ra’y were eventually persuaded or cajoled into accepting the authority of hadiths and so they too “found” hadiths which substantiated their doctrines that had hitherto been based upon the opinions of their schools’ founders and teachers. The insistence of the advocates of hadiths that the only opinions of any value were those which could appeal to the authority of the Prophet resulted in the situation that “where no traditional matter was to be had, men speedily began to fabricate it. The greater the demand, the busier was invention with the manufacture of apocryphal traditions in support of the respective theses.”
In summary, Goldziher sees in hadiths “a battlefield of the political and dynastic conflicts of the first few centuries of Islam; it is a mirror of the aspirations of various parties, each of which wants to make the Prophet himself their witness and authority.” Likewise,
Every stream and counter-stream of thought in Islam has found its expression in the form of a hadith, and there is no difference in this respect between the various contrasting opinions in whatever field. What we learnt about political parties holds true too for differences regarding religious law, dogmatic points of difference etc. Every ra’y or hawa, every sunna and bid`a has sought and found expression in the form of hadith.
And even though Muslim traditionalists developed elaborate means to scrutinize the mass of traditions that were then extant in the Muslim lands, they were “able to exclude only part of the most obvious falsifications from the hadith material.” Goldziher, for all his scepticism, accepted that the practice of preserving hadiths was authentic and that some hadiths were likely to be authentic. However, having said that, Goldziher is adamant in maintaining that:
In the absence of authentic evidence it would indeed be rash to attempt to express the most tentative opinions as to which parts of the hadith are the oldest material, or even as to which of them date back to the generation immediately following the Prophet’s death. Closer acquaintance with the vast stock of hadiths induces sceptical caution rather than optimistic trust regarding the material brought together in the carefully compiled collections.
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