{"id":45,"date":"2003-10-14T02:08:05","date_gmt":"2003-10-14T07:08:05","guid":{"rendered":"\/?p=45"},"modified":"2003-10-14T02:08:05","modified_gmt":"2003-10-14T07:08:05","slug":"mohammed-was-a-christian","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=45","title":{"rendered":"Mohammed was a Christian"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>In a recent blog entry I mentioned that Islam appears to have begun life<br \/>\nas a mildly schismatic Christian sect.  In the comments on that entry someone<br \/>\ncalled for sources.  Here is what I know about this:<\/p>\n<p>(First, a note on my general background: I am neither a Christian<br \/>\nnor a Moslem, and in fact consider those two religions #3 and #4 in<br \/>\nthe Most Toxic Ideologies Of All Time sweepstakes, after Communism and<br \/>\nNaziism.  I have therefore studied the history of Christianity and<br \/>\nIslam fairly closely, basically on the know-your-enemies principle.)<\/p>\n<p>There is a scholar somewhere in Germany using the alias Christoph<br \/>\nLuxenberg.  He has published a book called <cite>Die syro-aramaeische<br \/>\nLesart des Koran; Ein Beitrag zur Entschl&uuml;sselung der<br \/>\nQur&auml;nsprache<\/cite>. He uses a pseudonym because he thinks many<br \/>\nMoslems will want to kill him when they find out about it.  In this<br \/>\nhe is undoubtedly correct.<\/p>\n<p>What Luxenberg has done is applied the same methods of philology<br \/>\nand linguistics to the Qur&#8217;an that were applied to the Christian Bible<br \/>\nbeginning in the mid-19th century.  I have not read the book itself as<br \/>\nI have no German, but when I read several summaries of its conclusions<br \/>\nI was struck by the sense they made of some odd facts I had picked up<br \/>\nover the years.  Such as the datum that there is a Christian monastery<br \/>\nin the Sinai which received a special immunity, apparently from<br \/>\nMohammed himself, under terms its abbots have kept mum about for 1400<br \/>\nyears.  And the curious resemblance (you have to have read both the<br \/>\nQur&#8217;an and some odd Christian sources to notice, but I have) between<br \/>\nthe rhetoric of the Qur&#8217;an and that of a now-forgotten group of<br \/>\nChristian &#8216;heretics&#8217; called Monophysites who were particularly strong<br \/>\nin the Syria and Arabia of Mohammed&#8217;s time. And the fact that early<br \/>\nMuslims knelt to pray towards Jerusalem, not Mecca.<\/p>\n<p>You can read <a href='http:\/\/syrcom.cua.edu\/Hugoye\/Vol6No1\/HV6N1PRPhenixHorn.html'>this<br \/>\nscholarly review<\/a> for more.  Another discussion, which was written<br \/>\nbefore Luxenberg but is particularly telling on the evidence that Islam<br \/>\ndid not emerge as a separate faith until well after Mohammed&#8217;s death,<br \/>\nis <a href='http:\/\/www.atheists.org\/Islam\/mohammedanism.html'>at this<br \/>\natheist site<\/a>.  I&#8217;ll give you a summary of the high points, some of<br \/>\nwhich the reviewers (though not the atheists) tiptoe around.<\/p>\n<p>Islam, the Qur&#8217;an, and classical Arabic all formed in a<br \/>\ncosmopolitan culture of Syrio-Aramaic-speaking Arabs.  The religious<br \/>\ntradition that went with that language was Christian; in fact, the<br \/>\nvery word &#8220;Qur&#8217;an&#8221; probably derived from &#8220;queryana&#8221;, a Syrio-Aramaic<br \/>\nterm for a kind of Christian liturgical text. The variant spelling<br \/>\n&#8220;qur&#8217;an&#8221; for that word is attested.<\/p>\n<p>Mohammed was probably a Christian of a Nestorian or Monophysite<br \/>\nstripe, and the Qur&#8217;an originally intended as a commentary or gloss on<br \/>\nthe Syriac recension of the Christian Bible.  The surah or section of<br \/>\nthe Qur&#8217;an that Moslems believe is the oldest contains an exhortation<br \/>\nto take the Christian Eucharist.<\/p>\n<p>In fact, it is almost certain that the concept of an Islamic<br \/>\nidentity separate from Syriac Christianity did not develop in<br \/>\nMohammed&#8217;s lifetime; there are hints that it was a political creation<br \/>\nof the Caliphate, constructed soon after Mohammed&#8217;s death by the<br \/>\nCaliph &#8216;Othman.  Notably, he had burned all recensions of the sayings<br \/>\nof Mohammed other than the one prepared under his control.<\/p>\n<p>Many textual difficulties in the Qur&#8217;an vanish once it is realized<br \/>\nthat a lot of the words in it are fossilized Aramaic.  Luxenberg<br \/>\nwanders deep into technical philology here and you have to know a lot<br \/>\nof details about early Semitic writing systems, including the fact<br \/>\nthat they didn&#8217;t record vowels.  (I know enough to smell that<br \/>\nLuxenberg has a hell of a strong case.)  But the upshot is that you<br \/>\ncan go to Syrio-Aramaic vocabularies and extract clear readings from<br \/>\nmany passages that are maddeningly obscure if you&#8217;re running under the<br \/>\nassumption that they are written in the vocabulary of later<br \/>\nArabic.<\/p>\n<p>Remember the brief rash of news stories about &#8220;72 virgins&#8221; actually<br \/>\nmeaning &#8220;72 white grapes&#8221;?  That was Luxenberg reading the Qur&#8217;an in<br \/>\nits original Syrio-Aramaic-derived vocabulary.<\/p>\n<p>Islamic scholars of the Qur&#8217;an lost the knowledge of the Qur&#8217;an&#8217;s<br \/>\nAramaic origins shortly after &#8216;Othman&#8217;s book-burning. There are hints<br \/>\nof it in the oldest hadith (traditional saying of Mohammed) but the<br \/>\nhints don&#8217;t make any sense until you do the philology, at which point<br \/>\nthey snap into focus and startle the crap out of you.  The traditional<br \/>\nIslamic accounts of the Qur&#8217;an&#8217;s origins are are best confused, and at<br \/>\nworst pure inventions of the Umaiyyad propaganda machine that was<br \/>\nbusily turning Mohammed&#8217;s reform of Syriac Christianity into a new<br \/>\nreligion as the basis for empire<\/p>\n<p>One entertaining detail I didn&#8217;t discover until I did my<br \/>\nfact-checking for this essay is that Catholic theologians have been<br \/>\nclaiming Mohammed was a renegade Nestorian, or something like, for<br \/>\nabout a thousand years.  It also turns out that there are<br \/>\nscholar-priests in odd corners of the Christian world (notably among<br \/>\nMaronites in Lebanon) who had pieces of Luxenberg&#8217;s exegesis all<br \/>\nalong, but lacked the philological training to put them together.<br \/>\nNow it turns out they were right.  Who knew?<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/enetation.co.uk\/comments.php?user=esr&amp;commentid=106611183651268907\">Blogspot comments<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In a recent blog entry I mentioned that Islam appears to have begun life as a mildly schismatic Christian sect. In the comments on that entry someone called for sources. Here is what I know about this: (First, a note on my general background: I am neither a Christian nor a Moslem, and in fact&hellip; <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=45\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Mohammed was a Christian<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-45","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-culture","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=45"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=45"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=45"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=45"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}