Roger Pearse

Although this just seems to repeat the claim. I'm interested in getting to the bottom of them, you see.

I appreciate this booklist of general introductions to Islam, but obviously such things are unlikely to be specific answers to specific questions.

Not really a reply to my comment, tho.

Now onto your statement. I've heard this too, but I must ask: how do we know this? I.e. which piece of primary data lies behind these claims?

This must be a reference to a passage in the Koran itself; not sure how that answers the question about *onward* transmission tho? Or do I misunderstand (I haven't the text before me so please correct me if I'm wrong).

Again, the connection of this with my question isn't clear to me?

Well, a little at least. Do post more!

All the best,

Roger Pearse

French Prometheus

That's a bit of a problem for a text purported to be the uncreated Word of God.

What do you think of the Sana'a Manuscripts?

Solo

Roger, I am afraid this is not shaping as an intelligent debate. I cannot get "at the bottom" of this claim without a series of lectures, and I find that somewhat unappealing given that what I am saying is fairly trivial and stands buttressed by many known facts. One of them is a standard belief of Moslems that the Qur'an cannot be translated . A translation would void the prophet's words and meanings. Such idea seems bizzare but once you grasp what "the recitation" is , and realize that the qur'anic speech is collection of highly rhythmic, evocative chants (with somewhat unusual content - Manichean Ethics as fandango ? ), you will get the connection with with the echolalic transmission with little difficulty. It's so trite as to be self-evident.

Hoppe, hoppe, Reiter,
Wenn er fällt, dann schreit er.
Fällt er in die Hecken,
Tut er sich erschrecken.
Fällt er in den Sumpf
Macht der Reiter plumps !

Child nursery rhymes are easy to remember, nein ?

Sura 111, is called Al Lahab - the name of Mohammed's uncle who opposed him - and goes like this in the masterful translation of N.J. Dawood:

May the hands of Abu-Lahab perish ! Nothing shall his wealth and gains avail him. He shall be burnt in a flaming fire, and his wife laden with firewood, shall have a rope of fiber around her neck !

No doubt this was profound revelation (or perhaps a 'divinely underwritten curse') to Mohammed but it might not have been remembered for the Holy Book had not been taught as a .. hoppe-hoppe-reiter. Since I do not speak Arabic, I missed the core theological revelation to the prophet of S111 until I was told: Abu Lahab happens to form a hilarious pun with flaming fire.

Jiri

Net2004

what do you think of the reply to puin and toby lester ?

http://web.archive.org/web/200307020...+Contents.html

Roger Pearse

I sense your frustration, and I'm sorry if my queries annoy. I'm not interested in lectures; what I want to see is data.

But I wonder if you realise that, if the positions were reversed, most people here could answer each and every one of these queries with respect to the bible, and indeed a great many more? We really do know exactly what the raw data is for all the claims about the origins and transmission of the bible; or know that there is no data. I think we need to see this for the Koran too.

We need *facts*, not generalities. I suspect the problem is that you -- and indeed most of us -- don't actually know what the raw facts are. (I don't mean this as a slur). All we know is the stories we get told.

This won't do, for me anyway. It shouldn't do for you. The fact that a story is told lots of times by people living 13 centuries later doesn't really tell us much.

All the best,

Roger Pearse

Huon

The author of the reply to Puin and Toby Lester is :

Dr. MUHAMMAD MOHAR ALI
Formerly Professor of the History of Islam, Madina Islamic University, Madina,
and Imam Muhammad Islamic University, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.

Solo

I am not annoyed, Roger, and I suppose when you read this exchange with some lapse of time, you might sense not a frustration on my part but a big shrug and dash of irony. You are asking for data, i.e. a verifiable certainty, in much the same way that aaxxxx wants it. You want to ascertain that the transmission of the Qur'an had a dimension which just simply does not have a parallel in the Christian canon. So I tell you that there has been a religious functionary called qari, a specialist in oral transmission of the text, since the right-guided caliphs. (For the role of the pious qaris in the succession struggles under Uthman, see Malise Ruthven, Islam in the World (or via: amazon.co.uk) , p.175). Your response is to ignore this important datum, which whatever it really proves, does not argue for the importance of diacritics or minor textual variations.


You know, this reminds me little bit of the America-watchers of Brezhnev, who who inquired of US journalists why Watergate should not be read as a coup d'etat engineered by Senator ("Scoop") Jackson. Basically, what you are doing is transposing concerns from one literary tradition, which is in its origins heterodox, and multilingual, to another, which is orthodox and unilingual. To my mind, this approach misapprehends the issues no less than a translator of an Italian cook book who ponders the irregular use of tenses in a chapter dealing with the culinary properties of garlic in Marinara sauce.

I would be the first one to admit I don't have a clue what the "raw facts" may be, much less to what they relate. Now, it may yet be proven that parts of the Qur'an are of much later coinage than the 7th century, and it is certainly a possibility worthwhile exploring (e.g. some of the eldest mosques in Iraq had the qibla facing Jerusalem, and not Makka as the book instructs). But will it change in any way the nature of Islam, its steady preoccupations, its frailties and excesses ? Again, to me, this kind of focus misapprehends the important issues about organized religion, its historical roots and development.

No Roger, 1], it is not "a story", and 2] it is not "told". Ad 1]: to quote Carlyle, "it (Qur'an) is a wearisome, confused jumble, crude, incondite; endless iterations, longwindedness, entanglement". Ruthven gives an example of the 24th Sura (The Light) which asserts that God is light in heaven and on earth but only after denouncing adulterers (100 lashes) and slanderers (80 lashes) and quoting Isaiah (3:16) in urging women not to walk lewdly. Consequently, 2] the recitations sound to someone bred in a rationalist culture like tortured cadences.

So the question par excellence her is not whether the Qur'an has been copied with 99% or 95.5 % or 50% precision, but why this form of religious expression now dominates much of the planet, even in places where milder forms of the religious insanity once ruled, including perhaps some poorly policed neighbourhoods in your home town, Roger.

Jiri

Lógos Sokratikós

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harakat#History

Evolution of early arabic calligraphy (9th - 11th century). The Basmala was taken as an exemple, from kufic Qur’an manuscripts. (1) Early 9th century. script with no dots or diacritic marks [1]; (2) and (3)9th - 10th century under Abbasid dynasty, the Abu al-Aswad's system establish red dots with each arrangement or position indicating a different short vowel. Later, a second black dots system was used to differentiate between letters like "fāʼ" and "qāf" [2] [3]; (4) 11th century, In Al Farāh�*di's system (system we know today) dots were changed into shapes resembling the letters to transcribe the corresponding long vowels [4].

gstafleu

An interesting question. Now if the following is correct:
then exactly what type of religious expression is presented by the Koran? The bible, which is much more narrative in nature, can, as we know, be interpreted to suit just about any variety of world view and moral system ("The Devil can quote..."). This is probably the reason it has endured: it doesn't get obsolete due to its protean nature. Is the Koran an even stronger version of this?

If so, that would make the insistence upon the literal (down to the letter) content of the Koran quite interesting: the Koran is rather void of meaning, and hence its form rather than its content takes on primary importance. Adherents then can agree on the form, while basically supplying their own contents. Maybe that explains its success?

Gerard Stafleu

Solo

I would say yes, but the reasons do not have to do with the "form of expression" per se. It is more that the Christian world view was basically supplanted by the rationalist world view, which however steadily lost the common ethical and aesthetic roots. A Nazi can be rational, and so can the enemies of Nazism and their rationality would make them allies even though each of them for different "reasons". By contrast, there was no supplanting of Islam by rationality; it remained pure cri de coeur. Even the so-called "modernizers" of Islam (Afghani, Abduh, Qutb) were basically Lutheran revivalists of the original creed. (There is only one way to cut off the head of religion, said Abduh, and that is by the sword of religion.)

I think the fanaticism about the Qur'an being absolutely guaranteed, 100% "word" of God is exactly parallel to the Christian funamentalist boasting. It's simply a self-validating proof that the text and religion are holy and totally superior to any other religious claim in the world. I think Carlyle's lament was simply about the lack of cognitive structure that would make the Qur'an accessible to a western rationalist.
But you may be right about the content being of secondary importance. I have noted that the inter-islamic struggles are rarely (if ever) about canon (Qur'an + Sirat + 'standard' ahadith) theology. When the theologians of al Azhar protested against Khomeini's fatwa on Rushdie, the latter referred them to the prophet's order to disembowel the poet bin al Ashraf for insulting God and his apostle (recorded in the SIrat). That stopped the discussion, and never mind Shi'a vs Sunni or four major legal traditions in Islam.

Jiri