Notsri

Ibn Warraq's most recent symposium may be of some interest to readers here: Which Koran?: Variants, Manuscripts, and the Influence of Pre-islamic Poetry. (or via: amazon.co.uk)The table of contents can be viewed here.

Roger Pearse

It is good that the table of contents is online: this indicates that this is really a collection of mainly older articles by various authors (including Noeldeke, Mingana) reprinted from various journals. Ibn Warraq has apparently translated at least one article from French: does anyone know whether other articles have been translated.

I was not aware that Alphonse Mingana had written on this topic, although he was a considerable Syriac scholar and all his works -- including translations -- come out of copyright in January under 'life plus 70 years'.

The publisher, Prometheus, is not an academic publisher, though. Some will remember that they published R. J. Hoffmann's curious 'translation' of Porphyry Against the Christians, which was never reviewed by any academic journal; others that they published the book by the chap who announced that he had 'married' his horse.

All the best,

Roger Pearse

aguy2

I agree. I would think that arguing whether the Koran was compiled a few months before or after Mohammed is a hair-splitting degression.
aguy2

ROB13

It is strange that a book that boasts a title Die syro-aramäische Lesart des Koran: Ein Beitrag zur Entschlüsselung der Koransprache (The Syro-Aramaic Reading of the Qur'an - A Contribution to the Deciphering of Qur'anic Language) has a cover page that does not commensurate its title. One would expect that the author would have unearthed an important piece of evidence in the form of a manuscript, or an inscription to show the evidence of syro-aramäische reading of the Qur'an. Such an evidence on the cover page of the book would have befittingly matched the flowery title. However, to everyone's surprise the title page is from a first century Qur'anic manuscript MS. Arabe 328a located at the Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris.[58] A facsimile copy of this manuscript was published by Déroche and Noseda in 1998.[59] This manuscript is written in a hijazi script, with no vowels and rare diacritical points.[60] Even more damaging to the thesis of Luxenberg is that a recent study on this manuscript has concluded that this hijazi manuscript is written in the qira'at of Ibn `Amir [d. 118 AH / 736 CE] - one of the readings later to be declared indisputably mutawatir by Ibn Mujahid [d. 324 AH / 926 CE].[61] Even though there are no vowel marks and a rare diacritical mark in MS. Arabe 328(a), there is the consonantal outline of the text and, in a series of fragments as extensive as these, there are, fortunately, enough consonantal variants to enable the precise determination of the reading.

source:http://www.islamic-awareness.org/Qur...Mss/vowel.html

Huon

Nobody spoke of Luxenberg (in this thread, at least, I have not searched other threads). What is your point, ROB13 ?

Solo

But you see again this assumes some parallels between Xtian and Islamic canon which I don't believe exist. Accept for the sake of argument that Xty started, within a dozen years of Jesus with an authoritative text (in the "best" Greek available at the time). There would have been remnants of earlier codices which would bubble up from time to time later in history, as part of some specific theological complaint but without any sort of lingering effect on the mainstream theologies or church law. The canonical text would have undergone some minor revisions of vowel-fixing, accent diacritics and Greek phonetics (Greek remaining as the sole language of liturgy), with the occasional "blooper" of this or that word misapprehended, or debate on the "rhyming" quality of this or that colloquial Greek word in its gospel context.

Surely, the NT textual analysis would have developed differently, and the extant textual variants of the NT would have had different import. No ?

No, I don't believe the texts are uncorrupted, or that they proceed from Mohammed's personal recension. But, I also do not believe that the textual variants in the Quran present anywhere the same challenge, in puzzling out the early development of the faith as in the NT.

...."just as" ? The central question of the NT studies in the last 200 odd years is how much of the canon proceeds from Jesus and how much from the apostolic community. Islam does not have this problem. The Quran is Mohammed's - occasionally misspelled, mispronounced, probably abrogated quite a bit, but not written into for decades (centuries ?) by "witnesses" who in their ecstasies entered into conversations with the dead sage.

Well, he interfered with it to the extent that he relied on the memory of Zaid bin Thabit to the exclusion of the memory of others. But then again we have the lovely hadith from Bukhari, which tells us of the ever-hot Umar dragging another believer in front of the prophet, asking that he be punished for mis-reciting a sura. Mohammed asked the accused man to recite the disputed verses and confirmed that they were genuinely the recitation received from Jibril. The angry and confused Umar then rendered his version, and Mohammed confirmed that indeed that is the way he taught the verse to his father-in-law.

The proposition itself - as attested by the hadith above - is not reasonable. One cannot reason with people who are unreasonable.

Jiri

Roger Pearse

I'm afraid that your comments seem to be based on some other post than the one written by me.

All the best,

Roger Pearse

Toto

Wikipedia on The Syro-Aramaic Reading of the Koran (also see Christopher Luxemberg) This is the famous "white grapes" argument for mistranslation of virgins. The author published under a pseudonym. "Ibn Warraq" referenced above is also a pseudonym.

Huon

Thanks, Toto. Wikipedia mentions also Gerd Rüdiger Puin working on ancient Yemeni Qu'rans, which seem to show very old versions of the Qu'ran, more or less different from the version circulated by the caliph Uthman ibn Affan.

Huon

http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/%27Abd_Allah_ibn_Mas%27ud
(source in German, my translation) :

Abd Allah ibn Mas'ud was one of the most important companions of the Prophet Muhammad and one of the first Muslims, the sixth one according to the muslim tradition.

He is an important transmitter of Hadiths and plays an important role in the transmission of the text of the Qur'an.

At the time of Caliph Umar, he was appointed as governor of Kufa. Abd Allah ibn Mas'ud had prepared his own collection of the Qur'an, and he had increased and enriched it during his governorship in Kufa. This version of the Qur'an certainly did not contain the first Sura (Fatiha), which ibn Mas'ud considered as a prayer, but not part of the Qur'an. When Caliph Uthman explained that the version of Zaid ibn Thabit should be the only valid version, and when he ordered that all other versions should be destroyed, Abd Allah ibn Mas'ud refused to give his version, and let it be destroyed.

Muslim authors are inclined to interpret this refusal by the fact that Abd Allah ibn Mas'ud was sentimentally attached to his copy, and not because he held that his own text was better than that of Zaid ibn Thabit.