Dr. Günter Lüling: an unknown, but brilliant scholar in the field of
Islam StudiesBy Dr. Michael Conley (revised Dec 15, 2001) I would
celebrate the contributions of one of our foremost - yet widely
unknown (!) - scholars in the field of Islam and the Koran. I refer to
Dr. Günter Lüling, Erlangen in Southern Germany, who has been
subjected to wilful, vindictive exclusion from the proper academic
career for which he was eminent qualified. His crime? To have
demonstratively identified an interdependence between Roman Catholism
and the emergence of Islam which does not sit well with the
formalistic teachings of this august, but conservative to reactionary
enclave within the `learned community.' So gross is his mistreatment
that it evokes a question as to whether theological faculties should
be permitted in universities. It may well become necessary to banish
these proud centers about which the university of the early modern
period evolved if we would sustain the `scientific' and `empirical'
character of the research and teachings conducted in these
institutions. For details on the persecution to which he was
subjected, read on below. Dr. Lüling has written and published
extensively, yet one will not find his publications in a university
bookshop nor among the book sites in the Internet. Systematically
shunned by those who, by right, should be his colleagues, he and his
wife founded their own publishing house. His extremely valuable
investigations, published in the German language (!), may be acquired
either through book shops or by turning to his own German Postal
address: Postfach 2544, D-91013 Erlangen He may be reached
additionally by Telephone: 09131/34935 or by E-Mail:
[EMAIL PROTECTED] Two essays of his have appeared in the
English language. The earlier recounts the fashion in which he was
spurned by other Arabists and Islamists and appeared as "Preconditions
for the Scholarly Criticism of the Koran and Islam, with some
Autobiographical Remarks," the Journal of Higher Criticism Vol 3,
Number 1 (Spring 1996), pp. 73-109. The second appeared in the same
journal as: "A New Paradigm for the Rise of Islam and its Consequences
for a New Paradigm of the History of Israel," the Journal of Higher
Criticism Vol 7, Number 1 (Spring 2000), pp. 23-53. Prometheus Books,
Amherst, New York will publish his own translation of his most
decisive work with a new foreword in the course of 2002. As a possible
working title, the volume might be identified as "Regarding the
Original Koran; an Attempt to Reconstruct the pre- Islamic, Christian
Strophes in the Koran." For those with facility in German, I list
three of his currently available, most important works: - "Die
Wiederentdeckung des Propheten Muhammad; Eine Kritik am `christlichen'
Abendland, Verlagsbuchhandlung Hannelore Lüling, Erlangen, 1981. -
"Sprache und archaisches Denken," Verlagsbuchhandlung Hannelore
Lüling, Erlangen, 1985. - "Über den Urkoran; Ansätze zur
Rekonstruktion der vorislamisch- christlichen Strophenlieder im
Koran," Verlagsbuchhandlung Hannelore Lüling, Erlangen, 1993. And now
to the nature of Dr. Lüling's findings. We know from the labors of Dr.
Reinhard Dozy, professor at Leiden in the late nineteenth century,
("De Israelieten te Mekka") That intercourse between israelites and
arabs became substantial as far back as the time of Saul, David and
Solomon. The Simeonites, one of the major Israelite tribes, occupied
thirteen towns in the southwest of Palestine which they abandoned to
the end of pursuing and exterminating the Amalekites. The prophet
Samuel (I Sam 15:3) sent them into battle, crying, "Go now, fall upon
the Amalekites, destroy them and put their property under ban. Spare
no one; put them all to death, men and women, children and babes in
arms, herds and flocks, camels and donkeys." Four hundred youths of
their enemy, on camels had escaped to the south and Simeonites in hot
pursuit cut them down (I Samuel 30: 17). This is the occasion, Dozy
argues, for the migration of the bulk of the Simeonites far to the
south, in the region of Higaz, a land of trees and water. Several Arab
tribes joined them there (Ibn-Chaldoen, HS. 1350, II, fol.127; al-Bahr
al-´amiq, HS. 397). The minority that stayed behind was simply
subsumed into the tribes of Judah and Benjamin. There followed yet
additional waves of Israelite into what is known to day as Saudi
Arabia. According to the Arabs themselves, Israelites repeatedly
settled in Arabia: in Moses' time, in the time of Nebucadnezar, in the
time of Pompejus, Titus and, again, Hadrian. The two peoples, both of
them SEMITIC, accommodated to one another readily. Let us keep in
mind, in this connection, that nine tenths of the Semites in the Near
and Middle East are Arabs, not Jews, rendering the epithet
`anti-Semitic' a nonsequitur since it is presumed to apply only
Jew-baters. Beginning in this latter period, we pick up the
configuration in which Dr. Günter Lüling has labored for decades. We
determine that Mohammad and his supporters, back at the commencement
of the seventh century where concerned with something altogether
different than the Orthodox Islam of today. The facts appear to be as
follows. He has establish the following facts: 1) Following the three
Jewish wars of the first and second centuries (from 66 C.E. to 135
C.E.) large numbers of Jews fled to the south, to present day Saudi
Arabia. This brings us into the reign of Hadrian! They took with them
a nascent Christianity in its Jamean, Not Jesusian which approximated
the original religion of Abraham, a religion adapted to tribal law
(German: `Blutrecht') which stressed "Gardens, Holy Groves (consider
the Greek's chthonic sites) and High Places (the setting for Jesus
supposed `Sermon on the Mound') But the Jews fleeing the destruction
of three generations of war, did call their breed of Christianity the
way we do! They were known as EBIONITES = the `poor one' following
`the way.' Following the residence pattern of their Israelite
predecessors of the preceding centuries, they concentrated at Mecca
where Israelite had in all probability constructed the Kaaba. It
became (!) AN EBIONITE CHURCH! 2) Starting in the fourth century,
Roman Catholics - doctrinally now thoroughly Hellenised following the
Councils of Nicene (325 C. E.) and eventually Chalcedonia (451 C.E.) -
went down to Arabia to convert the Ebionites into Roman Christians,
preaching a) the recently contrived dogma of the trinity,
b) the adoration of images (e.g. crucifixion; Madonna and Child,
etc.) and
c) hierarchical organization into dioceses with a pope at the top.
3) The Arabs/Ebionites rejected the intrusion, insisting upon the
`Original Religion of Abraham'! THIS IS THE CONTEXT IN WHICH MOHAMMED
AND INITIAL ISLAM IS TO BE UNDERSTOOD. By the year 622, under the
prophet's leadership, the "return to our ancient, Semitic fathers" was
well organized and the work on the Koran had started. The adversaries
of the Prophet, the so-called MUSRIKUN were the Trinitarian
Christians. 4) About a THIRD of that Koran was made up of hymns that
they had previously employed as Ebionites, now rewritten as prose
text!! It has always been a commonplace that the Koran deals to a
great extent with biblical stories and persons, starting from Adam and
ending with Jesus and his mother Mary. Consequently, it has always
been reasonable, even to Muslim Koran scholars of all periods of
Islam, to speak one way or another of a thorough influence of Old and
New Testament stories and ideas recognizable in the text of the Koran.
But it is an absolutely new and different dimension of biblical
influence on the Koran when in Dr. Lüling's "Urkoran," noted above, it
is now proven on the basis of incontestable evidence that considerable
parts of the Koran text itself were PRE-ISLAMIC CHRISTIAN STROPHE
HYMNS, most probably predaing be about 200 years the emergence of
Islam and quite obviously originally used in the liturgy of Central
Arabian Christian communities. These pre-Islamic Christian texts - a
real pre-Islamic Christian Koran (!) - written in a vernacular Arabic,
were reworked and reinterpreted by the earliest Islamic collectors and
editors of the KORAN TEXT. The original strophic structure, with what
were once regular rhymes, was intentionally destroyed and turned into
continuous classical Arabic prose, the original content often being
reversed into its diametrical opposite. The reconstruction of the
pre-Islamic Christian strophic hymns and their original meaning is
extraordinarily well-founded because it rests on the simultaneous
application of no less than three different categories of
argumentation: 1) restitution of the original correct grammar of
vernacular Arabic, since Arabic strophic hymn-poetry has almost always
been written in vernacular Arabic 2) restitution of the original
strophic structure according to the well-known rules of early strophic
poetry. These two methods support each other and also cooperate with
3) the argument of content. That is to say that almost every
correction of a questionable content, an illogical idea or incorrect
biblical topos, is backed up by the fact that each such correction of
content at the same time turns out to be also a formal, i.e.
linquistical and/or strophe-technical restitution of such a test. Now
just a moment's thought quickly makes it apparent that we're dealing
with dynamite. Dr. Günter Lüling ventured into this matter back in the
60s and 70s and wrote his dissertation on the subject in question. It
was initially scored as "eximium opus" at the university of Erlangen,
meaning that his scholarship authorized his immediate advancement to a
professorship! In the following weeks, however, the Arabist and
Islamist on the faculty of the Erlangen University established that
his revolutionary proposition would make them look sick and render
their past labors superfluous. The professor who fathered his graduate
work informed him a fortnight thereafter that "his results are
unwelcome" with some elder German representatives of the branches of
Islamics and Arabistics. Anton Spitaler, Professor ordinaries, Munich
wrote in a secret report of 1970, "His results would certainly turn
upside down the hitherto existing notions about the history of the
origin, the text and the contents of the Koran." This had to be
prevented at all costs and so it was he who undertook all possible
measures toset all colleagues against Dr. Lüling. Ultimate, he was
EXPELLED from the theological faculty and confronted with legal
processes that lasted EIGHT YEARS! It is the elaboration of this
dissertation which Prometheus Books, Amherst, New York, will possibly
publish in an English language version. In the forward to the new
version, , in a footnote, Dr. Lüling cites from a book by Robert P.
Woff, Barrington Moore jr. and Herbert Marcuse, "A Critique of Pure
Tolerance," London 1969. The substance has wide applicability in many
field, not only his own. Wolff writes: "The application of the theory
of pluralism always favors the groups in existence against those in
process of formation. (p. 43) Pluralism is a philosophy of equality
and justice whose concrete application supports inequality by ignoring
the existence of certain legitimate social groups.If an interest fall
outside the circle of the acceptable, it receives no attention
whatsoever and its proponents are treated as crackpots, extremist or
foreign agents. (p. 45) By the same token, a policy of principle which
lacks legitimate representation has no place in the society, no matter
how reasonable or right it may be. (p. 47) Legitimate interests which
have been ignored, suppressed, defeated, or which have not yet
succeeded in organizing themselves for effective action, will find
their disadvantageous position perpetuated through the decisions of
the government. It is as though an umpire were to come upon a baseball
game in progress between big boys and little boys in which the big
boys cheated, broke the rules, claimed hits that were ours, and made
the little boys accept the injustice by brute force. If the umpire
undertakes to `regulate' the game by simply enforcing the `rules'
actually being practiced, he does not thereby make the game a fair
one. Indeed, he may actually make matters worse, because if the little
boys get up their courage, band together and decide to fight it out,
the umpire will accuse them of breaking the rules and throw his weight
against them! Precisely the same sort of thing happens in pluralist
politics. (p 49) Finally, the theory of pluralism in all its forms has
the effect in American thought and politics of discriminating not only
against certain social groups of interests, but also against certain
sort of proposals for the solution of social problems (p. 50f)
Pluralism, both as theory and as practice, simply does not acknowledge
the possibility of wholesale reorganization of the society. By
insisting on the group nature of society, it denies the existence of
society-wide interests - save the purely procedural interest in
preserving the system of group-pressures - and the possibility of
communal action in pursuit of the general good.We must give up the
image of society as a battleground of competing groups and formulate
an ideal of society more exalted than the mere acceptance of opposed
interests and diverse customs. There is need for a new philosophy of
community, beyond pluralism and beyond tolerance." Let me add a
bibliographic note here regarding probably the most thorough-going
critique of Christian dogma that has ever been written, namely Martin
Werner, "The Formation of Christian Dogma; a Historical Study of its
Problems," London: Adam & Charles Black, 1957, dedicated to Werner's
close friend, Albert Schweitzer - much as Lüling dedicates his work to
Werner. The Werner work, like Lüling's work, likewise originally
appeared in German. The translation was made by S.G.F.Brandon, hated
throughout Theology faculties for his decisive " Jesus and the
Zealots." I've recent acquired the English edition from the
antiquarian bookshop in London which I comment to all
[EMAIL PROTECTED] My copy is in fairly good conditions and I
know from John - that's the fellow's first name - that other copies
for sale do exist. No orthodox theologian ever refers to it - the
greatest possible recommendation.
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---------- home page impressum © 2001 Dr. Michael Conley
Jusfiq Hadjar gelar Sutan Maradjo Lelo
======================================
Orang Islam tipikal kudu sadar bahwa al-Mushaf itu TIDAK berbukti berisi wahyu
Allah
dan hadits itu mustahil ada yang sahih
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