Page 2 of 2 The Koranic quotations
trap By Spengler
Koranic
text criticism underground and it is difficult to
get qualified scholars to address the issue. I
have not reviewed the literature, because I lack
the specialist skills to judge the scholarly
arguments. On my desk is a remarkable volume by
Yehuda D Nevo and Judith Koren, Crossroads to
Islam (Prometheus Books, 2003), offering a
persuasive case that Mohammed never lived (at
least in any way resembling the stories of the
Koran and Hadith), and that the Muslim conquests
as reported by later historians
never occurred.
Nevo,
an Israeli archeologist, has examined the
historiographical record and shown that
7th-century writers, Mohammed's presumed
contemporaries, did not notice an Arab invasion of
formerly Byzantine lands. The accounts of the
Muslim conquest begin a century or more afterward,
and offer highly contradictory, boilerplate
accounts. It is not necessarily the case that
ancient reports of battles cannot be verified. The
details of the battle between Syrians and the
ancient Hebrews under Barak and Deborah, for
example, are consistent with features of local
geography mentioned in detail in the Book of
Judges. But no such supporting detail can be found
in any of the Islamic accounts. Nevo concludes
that battles were never fought, armies never
marched, generals never commanded, cities never
conquered.
It brings to mind Heinrich
Heine's comment about Jean-Jacques Rousseau's
Confessions: the French philosopher, Heine
asserts, made himself out to be a monster who
consigned his natural children to an orphanage to
suppress an even nastier truth, namely that the
children were not his in the first place. Better a
monster than a cuckold, thought Rousseau. The sort
of behavior that Spencer and other critics of
Islam find most objectionable well may have been
invented by the court historians of later rulers
to suppress an even more subversive truth.
One reason that the Koran contains so much
contradictory material (such that the odious Karen
Armstrong can quote it as readily as the estimable
Mr Spencer) might well be that it is a later
compilation derived from disparate sources. Ibn
Warraq, the scholar of Islam who wisely employs a
pen name, has assembled the scholarly evidence to
this effect in a single convenient volume. [4]
Part of the problem in addressing this issue is
that Christians and Jews are uncomfortable with
text criticism of their own Scriptures. I do not
believe that the Documentary Hypothesis destroys
biblical authority (as the German-Jewish
theologian Franz Rosenzweig said, the critics "R",
for "redactor", also can stand for
rabbeinu, "our teacher".
The
trouble is that apart from Pope Benedict, who
threw a few pebbles into the minefield and then
backed off, Western theologians have not had the
temerity to pursue the direction of theological
analysis that Rosenzweig set forth. The heavy
divisions of the West have sat in reserve, leaving
skirmishers like Spencer to throw themselves into
the breach with inadequate intellectual armament.
For purposes of argument, let us consider
the implications of affirming the hypothesis that
the Koran is an incoherent, contradictory muddle
stitched together out of a variety of contemporary
sources, including (as the pseudonymous German
scholar Christoph Luxenberg argues) Christian
material in Syriac. If that is the case, then it
would be impossible to derive any formulation of
Islam from the Koran. Should we conclude that
Islam is whatever anyone says it is? Not in the
least.
A religion is not a text but a
life. In his chapter on the Jewish religion in
The Star of Redemption, Rosenzweig begins
not with an analysis of the biblical commandments,
but rather with the Sabbath service recited in
Jewish synagogues. After each section of the
weekly Torah portion is concluded, the reader
thanks God "who has given us the Torah of truth,
and planted eternal life amongst us". By what
means do the Jews believe that God plants eternal
life amongst them? Rosenzweig explains that the
sanctification of daily life attempts to bring the
Kingdom of Heaven into ordinary existence.
Christians, by contrast, bring themselves to the
portals of the Kingdom of Heaven through
Communion, through the miracle of Christ's blood.
What is it that Muslims do to bridge the
great gulf fixed between the eternal realm and
ordinary human existence? I elaborated this point
in a recent essay titled "Not what it is, but what
it does". [5] My conclusion was that Muslims
sacrifice themselves, in a benign way through
pilgrimage to Mecca, but also in a malignant way
through jihad. It is not simply that superstitious
fellows blow themselves up as a way of obtaining
72 virgins in paradise (as Christoph Luxenberg
observes, the Christian source whence this is
derived was referring to raisins, not virgins). It
is that self-sacrifice in the form of violent
death in warfare is the Muslim equivalent of a
sacrament. As noted, I have elaborated this point
elsewhere.
This bears upon the misery of
US policy in the Middle East. No US strategist yet
has attempted to address the question of how to
defeat an enemy that is not only willing, but in
many cases eager to sacrifice itself to the last
man. The intellectual poverty of US policymaking
on the right is to some extent responsible for the
setback that the West has suffered in Iraq. By
failing to understand what it was dealing with,
the US administration lost popular support for the
"war on terror" (a fuzzy concept to begin with)
and has greatly restricted the options of the
West. Unless it learns better, the United States
is likely to make more mistakes, and risk losing
the great civilizational war now in progress.
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