Mick Hartley

This article by Andrew Higgins in the WSJ gives some insight into the current state of Koranic scholarship, and tells a rattling good tale at the same time:

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 Quran.

The 450 rolls of film had been assembled before the war for a bold venture: a study of the evolution of the Quran, 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 Quran research project buried for more than 60 years has risen from the grave.

It’s a great story – Spengler in the Asia Times describes it as Indiana Jones meets the Da Vinci Code. As it turns out the fate of the photos, suppressed by Spitaler for all those years, neatly symbolises the fate of Koranic scholarship in general. The Bible has long been a suitable subject for study, but the Koran’s a whole different ball game:

The Quran is viewed by most Muslims as the unchanging word of God as transmitted to the Prophet Muhammad in the 7th century. The text, they believe, didn’t evolve or get edited. The Quran says it is “flawless” and fixed by an “imperishable tablet” in heaven. It starts with a warning: “This book is not to be doubted.” […]

Modern approaches to textual analysis developed in the West are viewed in much of the Muslim world as irrelevant, at best. “Only the writings of a practicing Muslim are worthy of our attention,” a university professor in Saudi Arabia wrote in a 2003 book. “Muslim views on the Holy Book must remain firm: It is the Word of Allah, constant, immaculate, unalterable and inimitable.”

As Spengler puts it, “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.

Unsurprisingly then, Islamic scholars are uninterested at best, downright hostile at worst, in the whole business of historical analysis of the central pillar of their religion. And the Nazis, according to Higgins, didn’t help much:

“The whole period after 1945 was poisoned by the Nazis,” says Günter Lüling, a scholar who was drummed out of his university in the 1970s after he put forward heterodox theories about the Quran’s origins. His doctoral thesis argued that the Quran was lifted in part from Christian hymns. Blackballed by Mr. Spitaler, Mr. Lüling lost his teaching job and launched a fruitless six-year court battle to be reinstated. Feuding over the Quran, 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, Mr. Lüling went to Berlin to examine wartime records. Germany’s prominent postwar Arabic scholars, he says, “were all connected to the Nazis.”

Berthold Spuler, for example, translated Yiddish and Hebrew for the Gestapo, says Mr. Lüling. (Mr. Spuler’s subsequent teaching career ran into trouble in the 1960s when, during a Hamburg student protest, he shouted that the demonstrators “belong in a concentration camp.”) Rudi Paret, who in 1962 produced what became the standard German translation of the Quran, was listed as a member of “The Institute for Research on and Eradication of Jewish Influence on German Church Life.” Despite their wartime activities, the subsequent work of such scholars is still highly regarded.

Spengler again:

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.

There’s an interesting comment on all this at Metafilter (where I got the links), written by someone who clearly knows the academic field, and is deeply pessimistic of any advance any time soon. They write, “The emergence of higher criticism in the Jewish and Christian milieux was mapped on to a pre-existing political topography defined by traditionalists and liberals. Where Islam is concerned, it’s mapping onto a post-colonial structure, where any movement toward critical engagement with text is bound to be interpreted not as decadence but as ideological warfare.” So not only will scholars attempting a critical analysis of the Koran have to face the not inconsiderable wrath of Islam, they’ll also have to battle it out with the post-colonialist Said crowd.