Textual criticism of the Qur'an
Jan. 18th, 2008 10:57 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
qatarperegrineA cache of photos of very early Qur'ans manuscripts containing the Qur'an [see comments], thought to have been destroyed in World War II, has just come to light, according to the Wall Street Journal.
Apparently, in the 1920s and 30s, European scholars of Arabic traveled around the Muslim world, painstakingly photographing the oldest Qur'ans they could find. The oldest of these apparently dates from 700, which is pretty dang old for a Qur'an, given that the form of the book was standardized under Caliph Uthman in 650. German scholars are now undertaking a several-decade-long research project to compare these texts and see what they find out.
The Christian world has a longstanding tradition of textual criticism -- comparing ancient manuscripts against each another and coming up with heuristics about which variant is more likely to be original. Some of these heuristics include: early manuscripts are more reliable than late ones; readings that appear in geographically diverse manuscripts are more reliable than readings that appear only in one region; passages are more likely to be simplified than obfuscated; explanatory passages are more likely to be added than removed. To see textual criticism in action, check your nearest Bible for John 5:4. Unless you've got a King James Version, you're not going to find it: since that verse only appears in relatively late, Byzantine manuscripts, translations more recent than the KJV have decided it isn't an authentic Bible verse at all.
Such textual criticism doesn't exist in the Muslim tradition. It's an article of faith in Islam that the Qur'an is uncreated and unchanging, and thus that a Qur'an from 700 AD would be absolutely identical to the Qur'an sitting on my bookshelf, except that it would lack the dots that disambiguate many letters, e.g. ب from ت from ث, and also of course all the short vowels. I suspect the average Muslim would see the very existence of textual criticism in the West as evidence that the Bible is a corrupted scripture (silly Christians can't even agree on what their scripture says!). The application of these methods to the Qur'an is generally rather unwelcome.
So it will be interesting to see how this new find plays out. It's obviously going to be plenty controversial; you can tell that simply from the fact that more recent attempts by non-Muslim scholars to undertake a similar photo project resulted in the Yemeni government confiscating all the photos. The WSJ article quotes a Moroccan scholar as saying that this research investigating the Qur'an "is like telling a Christian that Jesus was gay." I think that's probably an underestimate.
Apparently, in the 1920s and 30s, European scholars of Arabic traveled around the Muslim world, painstakingly photographing the oldest Qur'ans they could find. The oldest of these apparently dates from 700, which is pretty dang old for a Qur'an, given that the form of the book was standardized under Caliph Uthman in 650. German scholars are now undertaking a several-decade-long research project to compare these texts and see what they find out.
The Christian world has a longstanding tradition of textual criticism -- comparing ancient manuscripts against each another and coming up with heuristics about which variant is more likely to be original. Some of these heuristics include: early manuscripts are more reliable than late ones; readings that appear in geographically diverse manuscripts are more reliable than readings that appear only in one region; passages are more likely to be simplified than obfuscated; explanatory passages are more likely to be added than removed. To see textual criticism in action, check your nearest Bible for John 5:4. Unless you've got a King James Version, you're not going to find it: since that verse only appears in relatively late, Byzantine manuscripts, translations more recent than the KJV have decided it isn't an authentic Bible verse at all.
Such textual criticism doesn't exist in the Muslim tradition. It's an article of faith in Islam that the Qur'an is uncreated and unchanging, and thus that a Qur'an from 700 AD would be absolutely identical to the Qur'an sitting on my bookshelf, except that it would lack the dots that disambiguate many letters, e.g. ب from ت from ث, and also of course all the short vowels. I suspect the average Muslim would see the very existence of textual criticism in the West as evidence that the Bible is a corrupted scripture (silly Christians can't even agree on what their scripture says!). The application of these methods to the Qur'an is generally rather unwelcome.
So it will be interesting to see how this new find plays out. It's obviously going to be plenty controversial; you can tell that simply from the fact that more recent attempts by non-Muslim scholars to undertake a similar photo project resulted in the Yemeni government confiscating all the photos. The WSJ article quotes a Moroccan scholar as saying that this research investigating the Qur'an "is like telling a Christian that Jesus was gay." I think that's probably an underestimate.
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Date: 2008-01-21 03:57 am (UTC)I posted this on Blah linking to you - I hope it's ok, let me know if you don't want it there. Thanks!