The Changing Quran

Sacrificer           unknown
Sacrifice code       wfor0232
Sacrifice date       25 march 2009

The Changing Quran!

Querying the Koran

Orthodox Muslims believe that this ancient Islamic text is the unchanging
Word of God. One scholar is daring to question it

Abul Taher
Guardian Tuesday August 8, 2000

A German academic fears a violent backlash from orthodox Muslims because of
his "blasphemous" theory that the Koran has been changed and revised. Such a
backlash is not to be taken lightly; the Salman Rushdie affair is a solemn
reminder of the power of an angry Muslim community. After the author wrote his
novel Satanic Verses, which was considered by Muslims to be blasphemous, a fatwa , or religious decree, was pronounced against him in 1989 that left him fearing for his life. Rushdie has only recently reappeared in public after nearly 10
years in hiding.

According to Muslim belief, the Koran is the eternal, unaltered Word of God,
which has remained the same for 14 centuries. But Dr Gerd R Puin, a renowned
Islamicist at Saarland University, Germany, says it is not one single work that
has survived unchanged through the centuries. It may include stories that
were written before the prophet Mohammed began his ministry and which have
subsequently been rewritten.

Puin's conclusions have sparked angry reactions from orthodox Muslims.
"They've said I'm not really the scholar to make any remarks on these manuscripts," he said. The semitic philologist, who specialises in Arabic calligraphy and Koranic palaeography, has been studying Sa'na manuscripts, ancient versions of the Koran discovered in Sa'na, the capital of Yemen.

So controversial are his findings that the Yemeni authorities have denied him
further access to the manuscripts. He says they shed new light on the early
development of the Koran as a book with a "textual history", which contradicts
the fundamental Muslim belief that it is the unchanging Word of God.

Any questioning of the authenticity of the Koranic text as the Word of God
can expect a hostile reaction. The fatwa , or death sentence, was issued against
Rushdie for hinting in Satanic Verses that the Koran may include verses from
other sources - chiefly Satan.

Academics offering radical interpretations of the Koran put their lives at
risk. In 1990, Dr Nasr Abu Zaid, formerly a lecturer in Koranic Studies at Cairo
University, provoked a national outcry in Egypt over his book The Concept of
the Text. There were death threats from Muslim extremists, general public
harassment, and in 1995 he was branded an apostate by Egypt's highest court. The
court forced him to divorce his wife because under Islamic law, marriage
between an apostate and a Muslim is forbidden.

Zaid's proposal was arguably less radical than Puin's. Zaid's book argued
that "the Koran is a literary text, and the only way to understand, explain, and
analyse it is through a literary approach". A Muslim, Zaid remained in Egypt
for a time to refute the apostasy charges, but fled with his wife to Holland in
the face of increasing death threats.

Puin believes that he will not receive the same reaction, because unlike Zaid
or Rushdie he does not have a Muslim name. His claim that the Koran has
changed since its supposed standardisation, and that pre-Islamic texts have crept
in, would nonetheless be regarded as highly blasphemous by Muslims. He has not
yet written a book on his radical findings, but says it is "a goal to achieve"
in the near future.

Dr Tarif Khalidi, lecturer in Islamic Studies at Cambridge University, warns
that the book may generate a controversy similar to Satanic Verses. "If Dr
Puin's views are taken up and trumpeted in the media, and if you don't have many
Muslims being rational about it, then all hell may break loose." Khalidi fears
Muslims will not accept Puin's work on the Sa'na manuscripts as having been
done with academic objectivity, but see it as a deliberate "attack on the
integrity of the Koranic text".

The manuscripts, thought to be the oldest surviving copies of the Koran, were
discovered in the ancient Great Mosque of Sa'na in 1972, when the building
was being restored after heavy rainfall, hidden in the loft in a bundle of old
parchment and paper documents. They were nearly thrown away by the builders,
but were spotted by Qadhi Isma'il al-Akwa, then president of the Yemeni
Antiquities Authority, who saw their importance and sought international assistance to preserve and examine them. Al-Akwa managed to interest Puin, who was visiting Yemen for research purposes in 1979. Puin in turn persuaded the German government to organise and fund a restoration project. The restoration revealed that some of the parchment pages dated from the seventh and eighth centuries, the crucial first two centuries of Islam, from which very few manuscripts have survived.

Until now, there were three ancient copies of the Koran. One copy in the
Library of Tashkent in Uzbekistan, and another in the Topkapi Museum in Istanbul, Turkey, date from the eighth century. A copy preserved in the British Library in London, known as the Ma'il manuscript, dates from the late seventh century.

But the Sa'na manuscripts are even older. Moreover, the Sa'na manuscripts are
written in a script that originates from the Hijaz - the region of Arabia
where the prophet Mohammed lived, which makes them not only the oldest to have
survived, but one of the earliest copies of the Koran ever.

Puin noticed minor textual variations, unconventional ordering of the
chapters (surahs), as well as rare styles of orthography. Then he noticed that the
sheets were palimpsests - manuscripts with versions written even earlier that
had been washed off or erased. These findings led Dr Puin to assert that the
Koran had undergone a textual evolution. In other words, the copy of the Koran
that we have is not the one believed to have been revealed to the prophet.

This is something that Muslims would find offensive.The idea that the Koran
is the literal Word of God, unchanging and permanent, is crucial to Islam.The
traditional Muslim view holds that the Koran was revealed to Mohammed by God in fragments between 610 and 632 AD. The revealed verses were "recorded on palm leaves and flat stones and in the hearts of men [meaning memorised]," and
remained in this state during the prophet's lifetime.

About 29 years after Mohammed's death during the rule of the third Muslim
caliph, Uthman, a standard copy of the Koran in a book form, was made, because
already divergent readings and copies were circulating in the growing Islamic
empire. This Uthmanic recension, according to the Muslim view, was produced with meticulous care, based on earlier copies of the Koran made according to the
instructions of the prophet.

Orthodox Muslims insist that no changes have occurred to the Koran since the
Uthmanic recension. But this view is challenged by the Sa'na manuscripts,
which date from shortly after the Uthmanic recension. "There are dialectal and
phonetical variations that don't make any sense in the text", says Puin. "The
Arabic script is very defective - even more so in the early stages of its
literature."

Like other early Arabic literature, the Sa'na Koran was written without any
diacritical marks, vowel symbols or any guide to how it should be read, says
Puin. "The text was written so defectively that it can be read in a perfect way
only if you have a strong oral tradition." The Sa'na text, just like other
early Korans, was a guide to those who knew it already by memory, he says. Those
that were unfamiliar with the Koran would read it differently because there
were no diacritical and vowel symbols.

As years went by, the correct reading of the Koran became less clear, he
says. People made changes to make sense of the text. Puin gives as example Hajjaj
bin Yusuf, governor of Iraq from 694-714 AD, who "was proud of inserting more
than 1,000 alifs [first letter of the Arabic alphabet] in the Koranic text".

Professor Allen Jones, lecturer in Koranic Studies at Oxford University,
agrees. "Hajjaj is also responsible for putting the diacritical marks in the
Koran. His changes are a defining moment in the history of the Koran". After
Hajjaj's changes in around the 700s, "the Koranic text became pretty stable", he
says.

Puin accepts this up to a point, but says that certain words and
pronunciations were standardised in the ninth century. He says the Uthmanic text was the skeleton upon which "many layers of interpretation were added" - causing the text to change.

This is blasphemy, according to orthodox Muslims, and is not entirely
accepted by other academics. Jones admits there have been "trifling" changes made to the Uthmanic recension. Khalidi says the traditional Muslim account of the
Koran's development is still more or less true. "I haven't yet seen anything to
radically alter my view," he says. He believes that the Sa'na Koran could just
be a bad copy that was being used by people to whom the Uthmanic text had not
reached yet. "It's not inconceivable that after the promulgation of the
Uthmanic text, it took a long time to filter down."

Puin's other radical theory is that pre-Islamic sources have entered the
Koran. He argues that two tribes it mentions, As-Sahab-ar-Rass (Companions of the Well) and the As- Sahab-al-Aiqa (Companions of the Thorny Bushes) are not part of the Arab tradition, and the people of Mohammed's time certainly did not
know about them. "These are very unspecific names, whereas other tribes are
specifically mentioned," said Dr Puin.

His researches have shown that the ar-Rass lived in pre-Islamic Lebanon and
the al-Aiqa in the Aswan region of Egypt around 150AD, according to the Atlas
of Ptolemy. He argues that pre-Islamic sources entered the Koran, presumably
when the growing Islamic empire came into contact with those regions and
sources. Khalidi says finding pre-Islamic registers in the Koran does not discredit
the Muslim belief in any way, because it does not threaten the integrity of the
Koran. "The Koran was revealed at a particular time in the vocabulary of the
age", he says. Puin also questions another sacred belief that Muslims hold
about the Koran, that it was written in the purest Arabic. He has found many
words of foreign origin in the text, including the word "Koran" itself. Muslim
scholars explain the "Koran" to mean recitation, but Puin argues that it is
actually derived from an Aramaic word, qariyun, meaning a lectionary of scripture
portions appointed to be read at divine service. He says the Koran contains
most of the biblical stories but in a shorter form and is "a summary of the Bible
to be read in service".

Orthodox Muslims have always held that the Koran is a scripture in its own
right, and never a shortened version of the Bible, even if both texts contain
the same prophetic tradition. Khalidi says he is weary of constant attempts by
western Islamicists to analyse the Koran in a parallel way to the Bible. Puin,
however, sees the need for a "scientific text" of the Koran, and this is what
he intends to achieve. He says that Muslims believe that "the Koran has been
worked on a thousand years ago" and "is not a topic anymore".

Not all Muslim reaction to him has been hostile. Salim Abdullah, director of
the German Islamic Archives, affiliated to the powerful pan-Islamic Muslim
World League, has given him a positive response. "He asked me if I could give him the permission to publish one of my articles on the Sa'na manuscripts", said
Puin. Warned of the possible controversy it could raise, he replied: "I am
longing for this kind of discussion on this topic."

***