Time Immortal

She was married off to a thirty year old man and abused almost daily for two months. And yet, in a country that affords women almost no rights, Nojoud Muhammed Nasser found the courage to head to a court in Yemen by herself in order to win a divorce from Faez Ali Thamer.

“My father beat me and told me that I must marry this man, and if I did not, I would be raped and no law and no sheikh in this country would help me. I refused but I couldn’t stop the marriage,” Nojoud Nasser told the Yemen Times. “I asked and begged my mother, father, and aunt to help me to get divorced. They answered, ‘We can do nothing. If you want you can go to court by yourself.’ So this is what I have done,” she said.

Raw. Courage.

May God protect and watch over this young child in her quest for justice.

It’s the last country on Earth that bans churches within its borders.

The Vatican is in negotiations with Saudi Arabia to open the first Catholic church in the kingdom.

Archbishop Mounged El-Hachem, the papal envoy to Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain, Yemen and the United Arab Emirates said talks had started a few weeks ago, in the wake of King Abdullah’s visit to [Pope Benedict XVI] last November.

Currently, all Saudi citizens are required by law to be Muslim, and the Mutaween, or religious police, strictly prohibits the public practice of non-Muslim religions.

The last Christian priest was expelled from the kingdom in 1985.

However, the Vatican?s relationship with the Muslim world is improving rapidly, and Qatar opened its first Catholic church on Sunday.

Mgr El-Hachem said a church in Saudi Arabia would be an important sign of ‘reciprocity’ between the faiths.

I find I cannot help but be a bit pessmistic about the prospects of these talks amounting to anything — the Saudi (Wahabbist) strain of Islam is perhaps the most bigoted and narrow-minded of all the various iterations of the religion of the false prophet that can be found in the world. Still, it would be an incredible thing to be able to return the light of the Lord to the darkness of the country that contains within it both Mecca and Medina. Pray for this event to transpire, O Reader, and call upon the intercession of every saint.

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)