Orientalists plot against the Qur'an under the guise of academic study and archive preservation
By Aisha Geissinger
In 1972, a 'paper grave' was found
by labourers doing restoration work in the Great Mosque in Sana'a, Yemen.
Between the mosque's inner and outer roofs was a collection of old parchment
and paper documents, damaged books and individual pages. Centuries of rain and
damp, and damage by insects and rats had made much of it unreadable. Qadhi
Isma'il al-Akwa', then president of the Yemeni Antiquities Authority, thought
that the find could be important, and tried to obtain the funds and expertise
necessary to examine and preserve the documents. In 1979 he managed to interest
a visiting German scholar in the documents, who in turn persuaded the German
government to fund and organise their restoration.
The German government sent Gerd-R.
Puin, a specialist in Arabic calligraphy and Qur'anic paleology, from Saarland
University to supervise the project in 1981. Now, more than 15,000 documents
have been cleaned and sorted, and lie in Yemen's House of Manuscripts. The
documents include tens of thousands of fragments from almost one thousand
different copies of the Qur'an. Some pieces may date back to the first and
second centuries after the hijra, making them among the oldest surviving
Qur'anic manuscripts. The Yemeni authorities do not want the fact that
Orientalists are working on these documents to be widely known, fearing protest
from concerned Muslims. So far, they have only allowed Puin and H.-C. Grant von
Bothner, an Islamic art historian from the same university, to examine the
documents closely.
To the excitement of Puin and von
Bothner, some showed minor differences in wording and verse-order from Qur'ans
in use today. Knowing that access to the documents could be prevented in future
if Muslims realized the implications of their research, von Bothner took more
than 35,000 pictures on microfilm of the texts. Now that the microfilm is
safely in Germany, Orientalists are free to study the documents and publish
their conclusions, and journalists, self-proclaimed reformers and other
interested parties can also discuss the implications of the find without having
to worry about jeopardizing Puin and von Bonther's research.
An article entitled What is the Koran?
was published in the Atlantic Monthly in January 1999 about this restoration
project. It clarifies its objectives: Puin wants to challenge the Muslim belief
that the Qur'an is the unchanged word of God. Muslims, he says, have agreed
with the textual critics of the Bible that the Bible has a history and
"did not fall straight out of the sky", but have refused to accept
that the Qur'an also has a history. He believes that the fragments found in
Sana'a will prove that the Qur'an is "a kind of cocktail of texts that
were not all understood even at the time of Muhammad" (p. 46). Andrew
Rippin, professor of Religious Studies at the University of Calgary, Canada,
claims that they show that the Qur'anic text "is less stable, and
therefore has less authority, than has always been claimed" (p. 45).
The fact is that the existence of
minor differences in wording and in the ordering of the surahs in the earliest
masahif (manuscripts) is no surprise to Muslims familiar with classical Islamic
scholarship of the Qur'an. Such variations occurred for several reasons. One
factor is the dialectical differences then existing in different regions of
Arabia. Another is that some of the Sahaba kiram (Companions) recorded such
masahif for their own personal use. As these persons had either memorised the
Qur'an in its entirety or large portions of it, such masahif were written
merely as an aid to memory. Therefore, notes in the margins such as the wording
of du'as (supplications) occurred, and the order of surahs varied. Books written
by classical Muslim scholars, such as al-Suyuti's Itqan, go into great detail
about such issues.
When the Khalifa 'Uthman ibn 'Affan
ordered that one standard text be used and others destroyed, the Sahaba who
possessed masahif containing variants did not object to this ruling, which
shows that they agreed with his verdict. Moreover, in the subsequent civil war
between the supporters of the Khalifa Ali ibn Abi-Talib and Mu'awiya, calls for
arbitration according to the Qur'an never involved claims that the other side
had an incomplete or changed Qur'an. This would have been a convenient and
devastating weapon if it could have been at all convincing. Knowledge about
these variations has been preserved by classical Muslim scholarship, and has
been useful to scholars of tafsir (Qur'anic interpretation). It was never seen
as evidence against the integrity of the Qur'anic text, however, and for this
reason Orientalists have not succeeded in building a compelling argument upon
it. Having their own documents to build speculations upon gives them much more
room to manoeuvre, as they can define the terms and conditions of their
research.
Studies of the texts are likely to
achieve two main objectives. For Orientalists, the Sana'a fragments provide
more material upon which to build conjectures about the 'evolution' of the
Qur'anic text and events in early Islamic history. Would-be reformers will use
the documents, or, more likely, Orientalists' conclusions about them, to
undercut the authority of the classical scholars and contemporary ulama. The
Atlantic Monthly indicates that some Orientalists and 'reformers' will work
together on the project of reinterpreting the Qur'an: An Encyclopedia of the
Qur'an, similar to Biblical encyclopedias written by textual critics, is being
published to present the latest Orientalist approaches to Qur'anic
interpretation. Nasr Abu-Zaid, who claims that the Qur'an can only be
understood as a literary text, and was legally declared an apostate in Egypt in
1995, is on the advisory board.
Western study of the Qur'an and of
Islam originated in missionary and military concerns. Modern 'specialists' in
Islam have tried to distance themselves from this heritage and project their
conclusions as secular, scientific and unbiased. However, the article reveals a
persistent Biblical as well as secular bias These specialists seem blissfully
unaware that Biblical criticism and their version of Qur'anic studies did not
"fall out of the sky" either. These approaches to scripture are
products of a particular historical, political and economic climate.
The Bible is the implicit model
against which the Qur'an is measured. It is considered a "cocktail"
because it does not present material in the chronological or thematic order
typical of Biblical narratives. Secular biases in both Biblical and Qur'anic
studies are revealed in hostility to divine revelation in any form: any text
dealing with miraculous occurrences is deemed inauthentic. Also, the Biblical
form of any narrative is considered to be the most authentic, because it is
older, while the idea that the Qur'an, as the latest revelation, could be
correct in its different accounts of events is dismissed. The limitations of
the purveyors of this 'unbiased' and 'scientific' study of the Qur'an are
arrogantly imposed on the sacred text itself. Puin claims that one-fifth of the
Qur'an is incomprehensible, apparently because he himself cannot understand it.
Fourteen hundred years of Muslim scholarship, devotion and art issuing forth
from the Qur'an are seen as carrying less weight than the opinions of a handful
of non-Muslims who cannot even claim native fluency in classical Arabic.
The fact that the preservation of
Qur'anic documents is left in the hands of such people is a tragedy that
reflects the impotence and lack of faith of the Muslim Ummah. It brings to mind
the ahadith which describe the disappearance of the Qur'an from the masahif and
the memories of people which will occur in the Last Days. The openly political
agenda of these Orientalists is evident; once the Muslims' confidence in the
authenticity of the Qur'an is undermined, Islam will have no social or
political authority. Muslims will no longer be able to claim to know what the
divine will is on issues ranging from the implementation of Islamic laws to the
liberation of al-Quds (Jerusalem).
Convenient solutions, based on the
realities of the political and economic domination of the west, will be imposed
upon them with utter impunity.
Muslimedia: May 16-31, 1999
