Mohammed was a Christian
<p>In a recent blog entry I mentioned that Islam appears to have begun life<br />
as a mildly schismatic Christian sect.  In the comments on that entry someone<br />
called for sources.  Here is what I know about this:</p>
<p>(First, a note on my general background: I am neither a Christian<br />
nor a Moslem, and in fact consider those two religions #3 and #4 in<br />
the Most Toxic Ideologies Of All Time sweepstakes, after Communism and<br />
Naziism.  I have therefore studied the history of Christianity and<br />
Islam fairly closely, basically on the know-your-enemies principle.)</p>
<p>There is a scholar somewhere in Germany using the alias Christoph<br />
Luxenberg.  He has published a book called <cite>Die syro-aramaeische<br />
Lesart des Koran; Ein Beitrag zur Entschl&uuml;sselung der<br />
Qur&auml;nsprache</cite>. He uses a pseudonym because he thinks many<br />
Moslems will want to kill him when they find out about it.  In this<br />
he is undoubtedly correct.</p>
<p>What Luxenberg has done is applied the same methods of philology<br />
and linguistics to the Qur&#8217;an that were applied to the Christian Bible<br />
beginning in the mid-19th century.  I have not read the book itself as<br />
I have no German, but when I read several summaries of its conclusions<br />
I was struck by the sense they made of some odd facts I had picked up<br />
over the years.  Such as the datum that there is a Christian monastery<br />
in the Sinai which received a special immunity, apparently from<br />
Mohammed himself, under terms its abbots have kept mum about for 1400<br />
years.  And the curious resemblance (you have to have read both the<br />
Qur&#8217;an and some odd Christian sources to notice, but I have) between<br />
the rhetoric of the Qur&#8217;an and that of a now-forgotten group of<br />
Christian &#8216;heretics&#8217; called Monophysites who were particularly strong<br />
in the Syria and Arabia of Mohammed&#8217;s time. And the fact that early<br />
Muslims knelt to pray towards Jerusalem, not Mecca.</p>
<p>You can read <a href='http://syrcom.cua.edu/Hugoye/Vol6No1/HV6N1PRPhenixHorn.html'>this<br />
scholarly review</a> for more.  Another discussion, which was written<br />
before Luxenberg but is particularly telling on the evidence that Islam<br />
did not emerge as a separate faith until well after Mohammed&#8217;s death,<br />
is <a href='http://www.atheists.org/Islam/mohammedanism.html'>at this<br />
atheist site</a>.  I&#8217;ll give you a summary of the high points, some of<br />
which the reviewers (though not the atheists) tiptoe around.</p>
<p>Islam, the Qur&#8217;an, and classical Arabic all formed in a<br />
cosmopolitan culture of Syrio-Aramaic-speaking Arabs.  The religious<br />
tradition that went with that language was Christian; in fact, the<br />
very word &#8220;Qur&#8217;an&#8221; probably derived from &#8220;queryana&#8221;, a Syrio-Aramaic<br />
term for a kind of Christian liturgical text. The variant spelling<br />
&#8220;qur&#8217;an&#8221; for that word is attested.</p>
<p>Mohammed was probably a Christian of a Nestorian or Monophysite<br />
stripe, and the Qur&#8217;an originally intended as a commentary or gloss on<br />
the Syriac recension of the Christian Bible.  The surah or section of<br />
the Qur&#8217;an that Moslems believe is the oldest contains an exhortation<br />
to take the Christian Eucharist.</p>
<p>In fact, it is almost certain that the concept of an Islamic<br />
identity separate from Syriac Christianity did not develop in<br />
Mohammed&#8217;s lifetime; there are hints that it was a political creation<br />
of the Caliphate, constructed soon after Mohammed&#8217;s death by the<br />
Caliph &#8216;Othman.  Notably, he had burned all recensions of the sayings<br />
of Mohammed other than the one prepared under his control.</p>
<p>Many textual difficulties in the Qur&#8217;an vanish once it is realized<br />
that a lot of the words in it are fossilized Aramaic.  Luxenberg<br />
wanders deep into technical philology here and you have to know a lot<br />
of details about early Semitic writing systems, including the fact<br />
that they didn&#8217;t record vowels.  (I know enough to smell that<br />
Luxenberg has a hell of a strong case.)  But the upshot is that you<br />
can go to Syrio-Aramaic vocabularies and extract clear readings from<br />
many passages that are maddeningly obscure if you&#8217;re running under the<br />
assumption that they are written in the vocabulary of later<br />
Arabic.</p>
<p>Remember the brief rash of news stories about &#8220;72 virgins&#8221; actually<br />
meaning &#8220;72 white grapes&#8221;?  That was Luxenberg reading the Qur&#8217;an in<br />
its original Syrio-Aramaic-derived vocabulary.</p>
<p>Islamic scholars of the Qur&#8217;an lost the knowledge of the Qur&#8217;an&#8217;s<br />
Aramaic origins shortly after &#8216;Othman&#8217;s book-burning. There are hints<br />
of it in the oldest hadith (traditional saying of Mohammed) but the<br />
hints don&#8217;t make any sense until you do the philology, at which point<br />
they snap into focus and startle the crap out of you.  The traditional<br />
Islamic accounts of the Qur&#8217;an&#8217;s origins are are best confused, and at<br />
worst pure inventions of the Umaiyyad propaganda machine that was<br />
busily turning Mohammed&#8217;s reform of Syriac Christianity into a new<br />
religion as the basis for empire</p>
<p>One entertaining detail I didn&#8217;t discover until I did my<br />
fact-checking for this essay is that Catholic theologians have been<br />
claiming Mohammed was a renegade Nestorian, or something like, for<br />
about a thousand years.  It also turns out that there are<br />
scholar-priests in odd corners of the Christian world (notably among<br />
Maronites in Lebanon) who had pieces of Luxenberg&#8217;s exegesis all<br />
along, but lacked the philological training to put them together.<br />
Now it turns out they were right.  Who knew?</p>
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