The Koran
Scriptural studies and interpretations of the Jewish and Christian scriptures played a key role in loosening the church’s domination of the intellectual and cultural life of Europe and America. The Muslim clerics knowing this are well aware that once the Koran is questioned, it will be subjected to the same scrutiny. And why not? In the 1970s, John Edward Wansbrough an American historian who taught at London University's School of Oriental and African Studies, wrote that subjecting the Koran to “analysis by the instruments and techniques of biblical criticism is virtually unknown.” Wansbrough wrote that the Koran is a composite of different voices compiled over hundreds of years. Scholars agree that there is no evidence of the Koran until 691 ─ 59 years after Muhammad’s death ─ when the Dome of the Rock mosque in Jerusalem was built, carrying several Koranic inscriptions.
These inscriptions differed from the version of the Koran that had been handed down to date, suggesting that the text may have been evolving in the last decade of the seventh century. More significantly, much of what we know today as Islam ─ the lives and sayings of the prophet ─ is based on texts from between 130 and 300 years after Muhammad died. As a result, some scholars suggest that Muhammad, like Jesus before him, was not a founder of a new religion but a preacher hailing the coming of a messiah.
Wansbrough believed Muhammad, was manufactured, a myth, and that Judeo-Christian scriptures were adapted for the Arab perspective
Many of the early Koranic texts refer to the followers of Muhammad as Hagarenes, and the “tribe of Ishmael,” the descendants of Hagar, the servant girl that the Jewish patriarch Abraham used to father his son Ishmael.
The undisputed fact is that Muhammad was an illiterate camel trader, and that he received his revelations in Mecca, a remote and sparsely populated part of Arabia far from any centers of monotheistic thought, in an environment of idol-worshipping bedouins. It will be interesting when historians finally explain how monotheistic stories and ideas found their way into the Koran. “There are only two possibilities,” said Patricia Crone from the School for Oriental and African Studies. “Either there had to be substantial numbers of Jews and Christians in Mecca, or the Koran had to have been composed somewhere else.”
These inscriptions differed from the version of the Koran that had been handed down to date, suggesting that the text may have been evolving in the last decade of the seventh century. More significantly, much of what we know today as Islam ─ the lives and sayings of the prophet ─ is based on texts from between 130 and 300 years after Muhammad died. As a result, some scholars suggest that Muhammad, like Jesus before him, was not a founder of a new religion but a preacher hailing the coming of a messiah.
Wansbrough believed Muhammad, was manufactured, a myth, and that Judeo-Christian scriptures were adapted for the Arab perspective
Many of the early Koranic texts refer to the followers of Muhammad as Hagarenes, and the “tribe of Ishmael,” the descendants of Hagar, the servant girl that the Jewish patriarch Abraham used to father his son Ishmael.
The undisputed fact is that Muhammad was an illiterate camel trader, and that he received his revelations in Mecca, a remote and sparsely populated part of Arabia far from any centers of monotheistic thought, in an environment of idol-worshipping bedouins. It will be interesting when historians finally explain how monotheistic stories and ideas found their way into the Koran. “There are only two possibilities,” said Patricia Crone from the School for Oriental and African Studies. “Either there had to be substantial numbers of Jews and Christians in Mecca, or the Koran had to have been composed somewhere else.”
posted by Peter de Krassel's Custom Maid Politics at 3:32 AM
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