Islam
watchers blogged all weekend about news that a
secret archive of ancient Islamic texts had
surfaced after 60 years of suppression. Andrew
Higgins' Wall Street Journal report that the
photographic record of Koranic manuscripts,
supposedly destroyed during World War II but
occulted by a scholar of alleged Nazi sympathies,
reads like a conflation of the Da Vinci Code
with Indiana Jones and the Holy Grail.
The Da Vinci Code offered a silly
fantasy in which Opus Dei, homicidal monks and
twisted billionaires chased after proof that
Christianity is a hoax. But the story of the
photographic archive of
the
Bavarian Academy of Sciences, now ensconced in a
Berlin vault, is a case of life imitating truly
dreadful art. It even has Nazis. "I hate those
guys!" as Indiana Jones said.
No one is
going to produce proof that Jesus Christ did not
rise from the grave three days after the
Crucifixion, of course. Humankind will choose to
believe or not that God revealed Himself in this
fashion. But Islam stands at risk of a Da Vinci
Code effect, for in Islam, God's
self-revelation took the form not of the Exodus,
nor the revelation at Mount Sinai, nor the
Resurrection, but rather a book, namely the Koran.
The Encyclopaedia of Islam (1982) observes, "The
closest analogue in Christian belief to the role
of the Koran in Muslim belief is not the Bible,
but Christ." The Koran alone is the revelatory
event in Islam.
What if scholars can prove
beyond reasonable doubt that the Koran was not
dictated by the Archangel Gabriel to the Prophet
Mohammad during the 7th century, but rather was
redacted by later writers drawing on a variety of
extant Christian and Jewish sources? That would be
the precise equivalent of proving that the Jesus
Christ of the Gospels really was a composite of
several individuals, some of whom lived a century
or two apart.
It has long been known that
variant copies of the Koran exist, including some
found in 1972 in a paper grave at Sa'na in Yemen,
the subject of a cover story in the January 1999
Atlantic Monthly. Before the Yemeni authorities
shut the door to Western scholars, two German
academics, Gerhard R Puin and H C Graf von
Bothmer, made 35,000 microfilm copies, which
remain at the University of the Saarland. Many
scholars believe that the German archive, which
includes photocopies of manuscripts as old as 700
AD, will provide more evidence of variation in the
Koran.
The history of the archive reads
like an Islamic version of the Da Vinci
Code. It is not clear why its existence was
occulted for sixty years, or why it has come to
light now, or when scholars will have free access
to it. Higgins' account begins,
On the night of April 24, 1944,
British air force bombers hammered a former
Jesuit college here housing the Bavarian Academy
of Science. The 16th-century building crumpled
in the inferno. Among the treasures lost, later
lamented Anton Spitaler, an Arabic scholar at
the academy, was a unique photo archive of
ancient manuscripts of the Koran.
The
450 rolls of film had been assembled before the
war for a bold venture: a study of the evolution
of the Koran, the text Muslims view as the
verbatim transcript of God's word. The wartime
destruction made the project "outright
impossible", Mr Spitaler wrote in the 1970s.
Mr Spitaler was lying. The cache of
photos survived, and he was sitting on it all
along. The truth is only now dribbling out to
scholars - and a Koran research project buried
for more than 60 years has risen from the grave.
Why Spitaler concealed the archive is unknown,
but Koranic critics who challenge the received
Muslim account suspect his motives. Higgins
reports,
"The whole period after 1945
was poisoned by the Nazis," says Gunter Luling, a
scholar who was drummed out of his university in
the 1970s after he put forward heterodox theories
about the Koran's origins. His doctoral thesis
argued that the Koran was lifted in part from
Christian hymns. Blackballed by Spitaler, Luling
lost his teaching job and launched a fruitless
six-year court battle to be reinstated. Feuding
over the Koran, he says, "ruined my life".
He wrote books and articles at home,
funded by his wife, who took a job in a pharmacy.
Asked by a French journal to write a paper on
German Arabists, Luling went to Berlin to examine
wartime records. Germany's prominent postwar
Arabic scholars, he says, "were all connected to
the Nazis".
Why were the Nazis so eager to
suppress Koranic criticism? Most likely, the
answer lies in their alliance with Islamist
leaders, who shared their hatred of the Jews and
also sought leverage against the British in the
Middle East. The most recent of many books on this
subject, Matthias Kuntzel's Jihad and
Jew-Hatred, was reviewed January 13 in the New
York Times by Jeffrey Goldberg, who reports
Kuntzel makes a bold and
consequential argument: the dissemination of
European models of anti-Semitism among Muslims
was not haphazard, but an actual project of the
Nazi Party, meant to turn Muslims against Jews
and Zionism. He says that in the years before
World War II, two Muslim leaders in particular
willingly and knowingly carried Nazi ideology
directly to the Muslim masses. They were Haj
Amin al-Husseini, the mufti of Jerusalem, and
the Egyptian proto-Islamist Hassan al-Banna, the
founder of the Muslim Brotherhood.
It
may be a very long time before the contents of the
Bavarian archive are known. 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.
Neuwirth admits that she has had the archive since
1990. She has 18 years of funding to study the
Bavarian archive, and it is not clear who will
have access to it.
When the Atlantic
Monthly story on Koranic criticism appeared nine
years ago, author Toby Lester expected early
results from the Yemeni finds.
Von Bothmer, Puin, and other
scholars will finally have a chance to
scrutinize the texts and to publish their
findings freely - a prospect that thrills Puin.
"So many Muslims have this belief that
everything between the two covers of the Koran
is just God's unaltered word," he says. "They
like to quote the textual work that shows that
the Bible has a history and did not fall
straight out of the sky, but until now the Koran
has been out of this discussion. The only way to
break through this wall is to prove that the
Koran has a history too. The Sana'a fragments
will help us to do this.
In 2005, Puin
published a collection of articles under the
title, Die dunklen Anfange. Neue Forschungen
zur Entstehung und fruhen Geschichte des Islam
("The dark beginnings: new research on the origin
and early history of Islam," Hans Schiller Verlag,
2005). This drew on the work of the pseudonymous
German philologist "Christoph Luxenburg", who
sought to prove that incomprehensible passages in
the Koran were written in Syriac-Aramaic rather
than Arabic. Luxenburg's thesis became notorious
for explaining that the "virgins" provided to
Islamic jihadis in paradise were only raisins. The
Koran, according to the research of Puin and his
associates, copied a great deal of extant
Christian material.
Apart from the little
group at the University of the Saarland and a
handful of others, though, the Western Academy is
loathe to go near the issue. In the United States,
where Arab and Islamic Studies rely on funding
from the Gulf States, an interest in Koranic
criticism is a failsafe way to commit career
suicide.
Neuwirth has led the attack on
"Christoph Luxenburg" and other Koranic critics
who dispute the traditional Muslim account.
According to Higgins, "Ms Neuwirth, the Berlin
Koran expert, and Mr Marx, her research director,
have tried to explain the project to the Muslim
world in trips to Iran, Turkey, Syria and Morocco.
When a German newspaper trumpeted their work last
fall on its front page and predicted that it would
'overthrow rulers and topple kingdoms', Mr Marx
called Arab television network al-Jazeera and
other media to deny any assault on the tenets of
Islam."
Despite her best efforts to
reassure Islamic opinion, Higgins reports, she has
stepped on landmines herself. "Ms Neuwirth, though
widely regarded as respectful of Islamic
tradition, got sideswiped by Arab suspicion of
Western scholars. She was fired from a teaching
post in Jordan, she says, for mentioning a radical
revisionist scholar during a lecture in Germany."
The story thus far recalls the ending of
another Indiana Jones film (Raiders of the Lost
Ark), in which the Ark of the Covenant is
filed away in an enormous warehouse, presumably
never to be touched again. The Muslim world will
continue to treat Koranic criticism as an
existential risk, and apply whatever pressure is
required to discourage it - albino monks
presumably included.
But that is not the
end of the matter. The Islamic world is forced to
adopt an openly irrational stance, employing its
power to intimidate scholars and frustrate the
search for truth. It is impossible for Muslims to
propose a dialogue with Western religions, as 38
Islamic scholars did in an October 13 letter to
Pope Benedict XVI and other Christian leaders, and
rule the subject of text criticism out of the
discussion.
Precisely for this reason,
Church leaders see little basis for a dialogue
with Islam. Jean-Louis Cardinal Tauran, who
directs the Pontifical Council for Interreligious
Dialogue, told the French daily La Croix, "Muslims
do not accept discussion about the Koran, because
they say it was written under the dictates of God.
With such an absolutist interpretation, it's
difficult to discuss the contents of the faith."
Throughout the Internet, Islamist sites
denounce the work of a handful of marginalized
scholars as evidence of a plot by Christian
missionaries to sabotage Islam. What the Muslim
world cannot conceal is its vulnerability and fear
in the face of Koranic criticism. In the great
battle for converts through the Global South, this
may turn out to be a paralyzing disadvantage.
(Copyright 2008 Asia Times Online Ltd. All
rights reserved. Please contact us about sales, syndication and republishing.)
Head
Office: Unit B, 16/F, Li Dong Building, No. 9 Li Yuen Street East,
Central, Hong Kong Thailand Bureau:
11/13 Petchkasem Road, Hua Hin, Prachuab Kirikhan, Thailand 77110
