Review Of Die syro-aram�ische Lesart des Koran: Ein Beitrag zur
Entschl�sselung der Koransprache ('Christoph Luxenberg', 2000, Das
Arabische Buch: Berlin) By Fran�ois de Blois Fran�ois de Blois
Journal of Qur'anic Studies, 2003, Volume V, Issue 1, pp. 92-97.
First Composed: 23rd August 2003
Last Updated: 23rd August 2003
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The title of this book announces a new 'reading' of the Qur'an and the
subtitle promises 'a contribution to the decoding of the language of
the Qur'an.' The author's theses are summarised succinctly in his
'resum�' (pp. 299-307): the Qur'an is not written in Arabic but in an
'Aramaic-Arabic mixed language' which was spoken in Mecca at the time
of Muharnmad. Mecca was 'originally an Aramaic settlement'. This is
'confirmed' by the fact that the name makkah is really Aramaic m�kkQ�,
'low'. This mixed language was recorded, from the beginning, in a
defective script, i.e., without vowel signs or the diacritic points
which later distinguish b, t, n, y, etc. The author denies the
existence of a parallel oral tradition of Qur' an recitation.
Classical Arabic comes from somewhere else (but we are not told
where). The Arabs could not understand the Qur'an, known to them as it
was only from defectively written manuscripts, and reinterpreted these
documents in the light nf their own language. The proposed 'Aramaic
reading' of the Qur'an allows us to rediscover its original meaning.
It might be useful to distinguish straight away what is new and what
is not new in these theses. Muslim scholars of the classical period
debated already the question of whether or not there is 'non-Arabic'
(Aramaic, Persian, etc.) linguistic material in the Qur.an, whereby at
least the more broad-minded authorities were content that there was;
since God created all languages there is no reason why He should not
have used words from different languages in His revelation. Modern
linguistic scholarship established, certainly by the middle of the
19th century, that the Arabic language, both in the Qur'an and in
other texts, contains a significant number of loan-words from several
dialects of Aramaic (Syriac, Babylonian Aramaic, etc). Aramaic was the
principal cultural language of the area between the Sinai and the
Tigris for more than a millennium and it exercised a considerable
influence on all the languages of the region, including the Hebrew of
the later portions of the Old Testament. The Arabs participated in the
civilisation of the ancient Near East, many of them were Christians or
Jews, so there is nothing surprising about the fact that they borrowed
heavily from Aramaic. But this does not make Arabic a 'mixed
language'. What is new in Luxenberg's thesis is the ciaim that large
portions of the Qur'an are not grammatically correct Arabic, but need
to be read as Aramaic, inflectional endings and all. The Qur'an is
thus not (grammatically) Arabic with Aramaic loan- words, but is
composed in a jargon that mixes structural elements of two different
languages. We shall examine the plausibility of this thesis in due
course.
The second principal component of the author's argumentation is that,
since the later Muslims were unable to understand the Aramaic-Arabic
jargon of their sacred book, they were forced arbitrarily to add
diacritic signs to the text so as to make it into halfway
comprehensible (classical) Arabic, thereby inventing a supposed oral
tradition to justify this new reading. To rediscover the 'original'
meaning we need to disregard the diacritical signs in the traditional
text and find some other reading. This line of argument is also not
new. It has been pursued in recent years in a series of articles by
the North American Arabist J. A. Bellamy as well as in a (particularly
bad) book by the German theologian G�nter L�ling; strangely, none of
these are mentioned in Luxenberg's bibliography. This too will be
discussed in the course of the present review. In any case, a book
that announces already in the preface (p. ix) that its author has
chosen not to discuss 'the whole [sic!] of the relevant literature'
because this literature' makes hardly any contribution to the new
method put forward here' is one that poses, from the outset, questions
about its own scholarly integrity.
But let us look at a few examples of the author's 'new method'.
Because of the technical linguistic nature of this discussion I will
use a consistent Semitist system of transliteration (in bold) and
transcription (in italics) for both Syriac and Arabic, a system
differing both from the one used by the author of the book under
review and from that otherwise followed by this journal.
One of the main planks of Luxenberg's theory of the 'Aramaic-Arabic
mixed language' is the contention that in a number of Qur'anic
passages the final aleph of an Arabic word stands not for the Arabic
accusative ending -an, but for the Aramaic ending of the determinate
state ( -� in the singular or -� in the plural). On p. 30 the author
discusses Q. 11:24 and Q. 39:29, where the 'current Qur'an' ('der
heutige Koran') has hal yastawiy�ni maQalan, 'are the two similar as
an example?', the last word being an accusative of specification
(tamy�z). The author thinks that the meaning is improved if is taken
to be a 'transcription' of the Syriac plural mtl' (maQl�) and that the
sentence consequently means 'Are the examples [plural!] similar
[dual!]?'. Translated into modern Arabic' ('ins heutige Arabisch
�bertragen'), the Qur'anic sentence would then (supposedly) be hal
yastawiy�ni l-maQal�ni. Most first-year students of Arabic are sure to
know that this is neither classical nor modern Arabic, but simply
wrong. But even without this lapsus, it can hardly be claimed that the
'Syro-Aramaic reading' offers any improvement in the understanding of
the Qur'anic passages.
On p. 37 the author discusses Q. 61:61 innan� had�n� rabb� 'il�
sir�tin mustaq�min d�nan qiyaman, which, if d�nan qiyaman is in fact
an accusative of specification, would need to be translated by
something like 'verily, my Lord has directed me to a straight path in
accordance with a firm religion', or, if we assume a mixed
construction (had� construed first with the preposition 'il� and then
with double accusative), it could mean '..... to a straight path, a
firm religion'. Our author's proposal is that the syntactical
difficulty of the latter rendering could be alleviated by taking not
as an Arabic accusative but as Syriac dyn' qym' (d�n� kayy�m�), which
he translates as 'a firm belief' ('feststehender, best�ndiger
Glaube'). But in so doing the author overlooks the fact that, unlike
Arabic d�nun, Aramaic d�n� does not actually mean 'belief, religion',
but only 'judgement, sentence'. Arabic d�n, in the meaning 'religion',
is not borrowed from Aramaic but from Middle Persian d�n (Avestan
da�n�-).
On pp. 39ff. the author connects the problematic Qur' anic term
han�fun with Aramaic hanp�, 'pagan', and specifically with the
Pauline doctrine of Abraham as the paradigm of salvation for the
gentiles. I have recently argued along similar lines in a lecture
delivered in the summer of the year 2000 and eventually published in
Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 65 (2002), pp.
16-25, but differently from 'Luxenberg' I did not fail to mention that
the same suggestion had been made long ago both by Margoliouth and by
Ahrens, nor did I commit the absurdity of claiming (as our author does
on p. 39) that Arabic is a 'Wiedergabe' of Syriac hnp', despite the
fact that the Arabic form has an -i-, of which there is no trace in
Syriac.
But in the eyes of our author, the Aramaic suffixes -� and -�
are 'represented' in the Qur'an not only by alif, but also by ha'.
Thus [p. 34] Arabic (xal�fatun) is 'the phonetic transcription' of
Syriac hlyp' (hl�f�). Unfortunately, no reasonis given for why, in
this 'phonetic transcription', the Aramaic laryngeal h is not
'transcribed' by the phonetically identical Arabic laryngeal h, but by
x.
On p. 35 the author discusses the Qur'anic word for 'angels'
(plural), for which the traditional reading is mal�'ikatun. The
author thinks that this is really the Syriac word for 'angels', which
he spells, in Syriac script, (correctly) as ml'k', and which he
transcribes (wrongly) as mal�k�; in fact, the correct Syriac
vocalisation is malax� (the first aleph being left over from the older
form *mal'ax- ) In any case, neither the Syriac spelling, nor the
correct vocalisation, nor even the author's erroneous vocalisation
explains the -y- of the Arabic plural. The author then goes on to
claim that the postulated 'Syro-Aramaic pronunciation' of the Qur'anic
plural is made certain ('gesichert') by the 'modern Arabic of the Near
East mal�yk�. This is a big jumble. In fact, the Arabic singular
mal'akun or malakun is in all likelihood borrowed from Aramaic mal'ax-
or malax-, but the plural mal�'ikatun is a perfectly regular Arabic
formation, and is represented graphically by , with the usual Qur'anic
defective spelling of internal -a-. The cited 'modern Arabic' (more
correctly Levantine) form is the expected dialectal reflex of the
classical pausal form mal�'ika(h), with palatalisation ( 'imalah) of
the final -a to -e (I see little justification for the transcription
with long -e), and has nothing to do with the Syriac plural malax�.
But once the 'mixed-language' status of the Qur'an has been
postulated, the author evidently thinks it possible to take any
Arabic word that vaguely resembles something in Syriac and to
determine its meaning not from the Arabic but from the Syriac
lexicon. Thus on pp. 196ff. the very ordinary Arabic verb daraba, 'to
beat', is quite arbitrarily said to derive from the Syriac verb traf,
which, among other things, means 'to beat, to move, to shake (wings),
etc.' Brockelmann, Lexicon Syriacum, p. 290, compares the Arabic verb
tarafa, 'to repel'. It seems unlikely that the Aramaic root should
also have anything to do with Arabic daraba; the correspondences d/t
and b/p(f) are certainly not the norm in Semitic cognates and would be
perhaps even more surprising in the case of a loan-word. But this
difficulty does not stop the author from assigning the meanings of the
Syriac word to the various occurrence of daraba in the Qur'an.
Then, on p. 283 the author claims that the Arabic verb taga, 'to
rebel, tyrannise, etc.' has, apart from the secondary , nothing Arabic
about it', but is a 'borrowing' from Syriac t`a. He then picks out of
a Syriac dictionary the meaning 'to forget' and assigns this to the
Qur'anic instances of taga. But the fact that the Arabic root has gayn
where the Aramaic has `ayin shows very clearly that the Arabic word is
not borrowed from Aramaic, but that they are good Semitic cognates.
Anyway, the usual meaning of Syriac t`a is 'to err, to be led into
error, etc.', although it can also mean 'to forget'. So even if the
Arabic verb were a borrowing from Syriac there would still be nothing
compelling about the new meaning assigned to it by our author.
I shall quote one last example of the author's 'Syro-Aramaic reading'
of the Qur'anic text. In Q. 96:19 the last word of the sura is (i)
qtarib, which has until now always heen understand to mean 'draw near'
(imperative). But our author [p. 296] thinks it means 'take part in
the eucharist' ('nimm an der Abendmahlliturgie teil'), since iqtaraba
is 'without doubt borrowed' ('ohne Zweifel .... entlehnt') from the
Syriac verb eQkarrab, which besides meaning 'to draw near', also means
more specifically 'to (draw near to the altar to) receive the
eucharist'. In support of this he quotes (on p. 298, in the wake of
some editorial mishap twice) a passage from the Kitabu 1-'agani) in
which the Arabic verb taqarraba is used unambiguously to mean 'receive
the (Christian) eucharist'. But this alleged confirmation scuppers the
author's argument. The (actually well- known) Christian Arabic
technical term taqarraba is indeed a calque on Syriac eQkarrab, with
the same stem formation, i.e., D-stem with prefix t(a)-. There is no
good reason to assume that the same Syriac verb was 'borrowed' a
second time as the (differently formed) stem iqtaraba.
The examples that I have quoted could be expanded manyfold, but they
are perhaps enough. They illustrate what is actually the less
controversial, or in any case less fantastical part of the author's
line of argument, the part, namely, in which he applies his 'Syro-
Aramaic reading' to the actual traditional text of the Qur'an. But
this book goes a lot further. Having established (as he thinks) that
the Qur'an is composed in an Aramaic-Arabic 'mixed language' the
author proceeds to juggle the diacritic points of the traditional text
to create an entirely new Qur' an which he then attempts to decipher
with the help of his (as we have observed, often very shaky) knowledge
of Syriac. I do not really think that there is very much point in
discussing this aspect of the book. There is no doubt that, without
the diacritical points, the Qur'an is indeed an extremely obscure work
and that the possibility of repointing affords virtually limitless
opportunities to reinterpret the scripture, in Arabic or in any other
language that one chooses. I think, however, that any reader who wants
to take the trouble to plough through Luxenberg's 'new reading' of any
of the numerous passages discussed in this book will concede that the
'new reading' does not actually make better sense than a straight
classical Arabic reading of the traditional text. It is a reading that
is potentially attractive only in its novelty, or shall I say its
perversity, not in that it sheds any light on the meaning of the book
or on the history of Islam.
It is necessary, in conclusion to say a little about the authorship,
or rather the non-authorship, the pseudonymity of this book. An
article published in the New York Times on 2nd March 2002 (and
subsequently broadly disseminated in the internet) referred to this
book as the work of 'Christoph Luxenberg, a scholar of ancient Semitic
languages in Germany'. It is, I think, sufficiently clear from this
review that the person in question is not 'a scholar of ancient
Semitic languages'. He is someone who evidently speaks some Arabic
dialect, has a passable, but not flawless command of classical Arabic,
knows enough Syriac so as to be able to consult a dictionary, but is
innocent of any real understanding of the methodology of comparative
Semitic linguistics. His book is not a work of scholarship but of
dilettantism.
The NYT article goes on to state that 'Christoph Luxeuberg is a
pseudonym', to compare him with Salman Rushdie, Naguib Mahfouz and
Suliman Bashear and to talk about 'threatened violence as well as the
widespread reluctance on United States college campuses to criticize
other cultures'. I am not sure what precisely the author means with
'in Germany'. According to my information, 'Christoph Luxenberg' is
not a German but a Lebanese Christian. It is thus not a question of
some intrepid philologist, pouring over dusty books in obscure
languages somewhere in the provinces of Germany and then having to
publish his results under a pseudonym so as to avoid the death threats
of rabid Muslim extremists, in short an ivory-tower Rushdie. Let us
not exaggerate the state of academic freedom in what we still like to
call our Western democracies. No European or North American scholar of
linguistics, even of Arabic linguistics, needs to conceal his (or her)
identity, nor does he (or she) really have any right to do so. These
matters must be discussed in public. In the Near East things are, of
course, very different.
Islamic Awareness Qur'an Text Review Of Die syro-aramaische
Lesart des Koran: Ein Beitrag zur Entschlusselung der Koransprache
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