85 lines
6.0 KiB
Plaintext
85 lines
6.0 KiB
Plaintext
Mohammed was a Christian
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<p>In a recent blog entry I mentioned that Islam appears to have begun life<br />
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as a mildly schismatic Christian sect. In the comments on that entry someone<br />
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called for sources. Here is what I know about this:</p>
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<p>(First, a note on my general background: I am neither a Christian<br />
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nor a Moslem, and in fact consider those two religions #3 and #4 in<br />
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the Most Toxic Ideologies Of All Time sweepstakes, after Communism and<br />
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Naziism. I have therefore studied the history of Christianity and<br />
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Islam fairly closely, basically on the know-your-enemies principle.)</p>
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<p>There is a scholar somewhere in Germany using the alias Christoph<br />
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Luxenberg. He has published a book called <cite>Die syro-aramaeische<br />
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Lesart des Koran; Ein Beitrag zur Entschlüsselung der<br />
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Quränsprache</cite>. He uses a pseudonym because he thinks many<br />
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Moslems will want to kill him when they find out about it. In this<br />
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he is undoubtedly correct.</p>
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<p>What Luxenberg has done is applied the same methods of philology<br />
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and linguistics to the Qur’an that were applied to the Christian Bible<br />
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beginning in the mid-19th century. I have not read the book itself as<br />
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I have no German, but when I read several summaries of its conclusions<br />
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I was struck by the sense they made of some odd facts I had picked up<br />
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over the years. Such as the datum that there is a Christian monastery<br />
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in the Sinai which received a special immunity, apparently from<br />
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Mohammed himself, under terms its abbots have kept mum about for 1400<br />
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years. And the curious resemblance (you have to have read both the<br />
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Qur’an and some odd Christian sources to notice, but I have) between<br />
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the rhetoric of the Qur’an and that of a now-forgotten group of<br />
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Christian ‘heretics’ called Monophysites who were particularly strong<br />
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in the Syria and Arabia of Mohammed’s time. And the fact that early<br />
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Muslims knelt to pray towards Jerusalem, not Mecca.</p>
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<p>You can read <a href='http://syrcom.cua.edu/Hugoye/Vol6No1/HV6N1PRPhenixHorn.html'>this<br />
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scholarly review</a> for more. Another discussion, which was written<br />
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before Luxenberg but is particularly telling on the evidence that Islam<br />
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did not emerge as a separate faith until well after Mohammed’s death,<br />
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is <a href='http://www.atheists.org/Islam/mohammedanism.html'>at this<br />
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atheist site</a>. I’ll give you a summary of the high points, some of<br />
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which the reviewers (though not the atheists) tiptoe around.</p>
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<p>Islam, the Qur’an, and classical Arabic all formed in a<br />
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cosmopolitan culture of Syrio-Aramaic-speaking Arabs. The religious<br />
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tradition that went with that language was Christian; in fact, the<br />
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very word “Qur’an” probably derived from “queryana”, a Syrio-Aramaic<br />
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term for a kind of Christian liturgical text. The variant spelling<br />
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“qur’an” for that word is attested.</p>
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<p>Mohammed was probably a Christian of a Nestorian or Monophysite<br />
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stripe, and the Qur’an originally intended as a commentary or gloss on<br />
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the Syriac recension of the Christian Bible. The surah or section of<br />
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the Qur’an that Moslems believe is the oldest contains an exhortation<br />
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to take the Christian Eucharist.</p>
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<p>In fact, it is almost certain that the concept of an Islamic<br />
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identity separate from Syriac Christianity did not develop in<br />
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Mohammed’s lifetime; there are hints that it was a political creation<br />
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of the Caliphate, constructed soon after Mohammed’s death by the<br />
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Caliph ‘Othman. Notably, he had burned all recensions of the sayings<br />
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of Mohammed other than the one prepared under his control.</p>
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<p>Many textual difficulties in the Qur’an vanish once it is realized<br />
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that a lot of the words in it are fossilized Aramaic. Luxenberg<br />
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wanders deep into technical philology here and you have to know a lot<br />
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of details about early Semitic writing systems, including the fact<br />
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that they didn’t record vowels. (I know enough to smell that<br />
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Luxenberg has a hell of a strong case.) But the upshot is that you<br />
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can go to Syrio-Aramaic vocabularies and extract clear readings from<br />
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many passages that are maddeningly obscure if you’re running under the<br />
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assumption that they are written in the vocabulary of later<br />
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Arabic.</p>
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<p>Remember the brief rash of news stories about “72 virgins” actually<br />
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meaning “72 white grapes”? That was Luxenberg reading the Qur’an in<br />
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its original Syrio-Aramaic-derived vocabulary.</p>
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<p>Islamic scholars of the Qur’an lost the knowledge of the Qur’an’s<br />
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Aramaic origins shortly after ‘Othman’s book-burning. There are hints<br />
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of it in the oldest hadith (traditional saying of Mohammed) but the<br />
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hints don’t make any sense until you do the philology, at which point<br />
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they snap into focus and startle the crap out of you. The traditional<br />
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Islamic accounts of the Qur’an’s origins are are best confused, and at<br />
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worst pure inventions of the Umaiyyad propaganda machine that was<br />
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busily turning Mohammed’s reform of Syriac Christianity into a new<br />
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religion as the basis for empire</p>
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<p>One entertaining detail I didn’t discover until I did my<br />
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fact-checking for this essay is that Catholic theologians have been<br />
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claiming Mohammed was a renegade Nestorian, or something like, for<br />
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about a thousand years. It also turns out that there are<br />
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scholar-priests in odd corners of the Christian world (notably among<br />
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Maronites in Lebanon) who had pieces of Luxenberg’s exegesis all<br />
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along, but lacked the philological training to put them together.<br />
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Now it turns out they were right. Who knew?</p>
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<p><a href="http://enetation.co.uk/comments.php?user=esr&commentid=106611183651268907">Blogspot comments</a></p>
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