Time Immortal

Erf writes in with some potentially encouraging news. Following on the heels of the outcome of elections in northern Pakistan (in which Islamist parties lost, heavily), the possibility of a theological reformation in Islam is an exciting prospect indeed.

Erf, thank you for the update. I’d missed this story in the BBC newsfeed.

Wow — it looks like there’s a major reformation of Islam in progress in Turkey, according to BBC News. They’re reinterpereting what’s described as Islam’s second most fundamental text, the Hadith, applying the sort of analysis and verification techniques developed for the study of the Bible and other early religious texts. They mention specifically that all this violence againste and oppression of women going on in modern “Islam” was never intended by Muhommad and doesn’t belong. They even talk about interpereting statements and messages in the context of the culture and times in which they were given. For example, from the article:

“There are some messages that ban women from travelling for three days or more without their husband’s permission and they are genuine.

“But this isn’t a religious ban. It came about because in the Prophet’s time it simply wasn’t safe for a woman to travel alone like that. But as time has passed, people have made permanent what was only supposed to be a temporary ban for safety reasons.”

Here’s hoping this works, and spreads…

I would have to agree — this sort of reformative thinking must spread, and must be encouraged in its spread by…religious leaders in the West, Islamic and non-Islamic alike.

Of potential concern is the mention of how they are going to attempt to apply ” the sort of analysis and verification techniques developed for the study of the Bible and other early religious texts” to the Hadith. The University of the Saarland demonstrated a while ago (although they kept it under wraps until just recently) that when the Koran is held up to such analytical standards, its validity as a divinely inspired text rapidly crumbles, and it can demonstrably be shown to not have been dictated by the Archangel Gabriel at all — in fact, it was redacted from many extra-canonical Jewish and Christian (or Gnostic) sources.

Now, the Hadith are, if memory serves, the recorded sayings and teachings of Muhammad after he authored the Koran. Both Sunni and Shia Islam accept the validity of the Hadith in general, although the Shia Hadith also allows for the addition of additional traditions and teachings transmitted through the line of Muhammed descended from Fatima Zahra. Sunni Muslims would not recognize the validity of these additional teachings.

It would be interesting to see what would result from some genuine religious scholarly investigation of the Hadith, and one would certainly hope that at the outcome of such an investigation, a movement could get underway to attempt to reverse some of the many backward, barbaric, and misogynistic tendencies one sees in Islam the world over, and in Sharia law in particular.

But in particular, the best one can hope is that the scholars who are commissioned to do this research are able to approach their subject with no pre-existing bias or opinion about the Hadith’s teachings or the intent of Muhammad when he gave the teachings that he did. If they can do that much, this study might have some very good outcomes. Or, at least, some very honest outcomes.

No one is going to produce proof that Jesus Christ did not rise from the grave three days after the Crucifixion, of course. Humankind will choose to believe or not that God revealed Himself in this fashion. But Islam stands at risk of a Da Vinci Code effect, for in Islam, God’s self-revelation took the form not of the Exodus, nor the revelation at Mount Sinai, nor the Resurrection, but rather a book, namely the Koran. The Encyclopaedia of Islam (1982) observes, “The closest analogue in Christian belief to the role of the Koran in Muslim belief is not the Bible, but Christ.” The Koran alone is the revelatory event in Islam.

What if scholars can prove beyond reasonable doubt that the Koran was not dictated by the Archangel Gabriel to the Prophet [Muhammad] during the 7th century, but rather was redacted by later writers drawing on a variety of extant Christian and Jewish sources? That would be the precise equivalent of proving that the Jesus Christ of the Gospels really was a composite of several individuals, some of whom lived a century or two apart.

It has long been known that variant copies of the Koran exist, including some found in 1972 in a paper grave at in Yemen, the subject of a cover story in the January 1999 Atlantic Monthly. Before the Yemeni authorities shut the door to Western scholars, two German academics, Gerhard R Puin and H C Graf von Bothmer, made 35,000 microfilm copies, which remain at the University of the Saarland. Many scholars believe that the German archive, which includes photocopies of manuscripts as old as 700 AD, will provide more evidence of variation in the Koran.

The history of the archive reads like an Islamic version of the Da Vinci Code. It is not clear why its existence was occulted for sixty years, or why it has come to light now, or when scholars will have free access to it.

Interesting, to say the least. Not that I have any doubts that Islam, as a religion, is false…but in studying Scripture for the various classes I’ve taken on the science-religion dialogue, and in forming various apologetics related to that, one of the things I’ve stumbled across is that Scripture (especially the early books of what Christians call the Old Testament) is formed from different written sources which were redacted together several centuries before the birth of Christ. It is not unreasonable to assume that the Islamic holy book was similarly comprised from several different sources — many ancient texts were.

Where the problem arises, as the article above points out, is that such a discovery would actually be a bit of an undoing for Islam…because the Koran occupies such a high place in Islamic theology, since it is reportedly (if I understand the idea correctly) Muhammad’s direct transcription of the literal word of Allah as delivered by the angel Gabriel. Unlike the Bible, Talmud, or Torah (all of which are understood to be the works of human authors whose words God has guided, but who are still writing as free and rational persons all their own), the Koran cannot survive the discovery that it is comprised of writings from several different authorial sources. And absent the Koran, Islam cannot thrive.

Now, the Reader might be wondering why this discovery hasn’t come to light until now, despite the history behind it. Well…in a word, the Nazis:

Why were the Nazis so eager to suppress Koranic criticism? Most likely, the answer lies in their alliance with Islamist leaders, who shared their hatred of the Jews and also sought leverage against the British in the Middle East. The most recent of many books on this subject, Matthias Kuntzel’s Jihad and Jew-Hatred, was reviewed January 13 in the New York Times by Jeffrey Goldberg, who reports

Kuntzel makes a bold and consequential argument: the dissemination of European models of anti-Semitism among Muslims was not haphazard, but an actual project of the Nazi Party, meant to turn Muslims against Jews and Zionism. He says that in the years before World War II, two Muslim leaders in particular willingly and knowingly carried Nazi ideology directly to the Muslim masses. They were Haj Amin al-Husseini, the mufti of Jerusalem, and the Egyptian proto-Islamist Hassan al-Banna, the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood.

It may be a very long time before the contents of the Bavarian archive are known. Some Koranic critics, notably the pseudonymous scholar “Ibn Warraq”, claim that Professor Angelika Neuwirth, the archive’s custodian, has denied access to scholars who stray from the traditional interpretation. Neuwirth admits that she has had the archive since 1990. She has 18 years of funding to study the Bavarian archive, and it is not clear who will have access to it.

The collusion between the Nazis and some of the Islamic regimes in Arabia have been documented by others. What is surprising to learn is that Hitler’s regime was evidently so committed to that collusion that it was willing to try and suppress this sort of study.

(In Soviet Russia, hat tips you: Ace of Spades)