Islam's Foundation

...The latest, What the Koran Really Says, deals with the subject at its most fundamental level, studying the language of the Koran, searching out linguistic echoes of its debts to its sources, and dealing with passages of a symptomatically obscure nature...

...Warraq may well be the most prominent authority on Islamic history and culture who is not a Muslim apologist or a political partisan but a critic...

...It well may be that the only defense against Wansbrough is to pay him no heed...

...lest the daughters of the Philistines rejoice, lest the daughters of the uncircumcised triumph," as the Second Book of Samuel puts it, has been the response of orthodox Islam to this feat of infidel scholarship...

...Commentators on the Koran have been sentenced to death for suggesting that Muhammad's parents might not have been Muslims, and Islamic fundamentalists like the Taliban institute Orwellian regimes in the name of Islamic law...

...The shock waves generated by those inquiries still can be measured among all denominations, from the least doctrinaire Unitarians to the most diehard fundamentalists—who yet, for all the difference in their creeds, have found a way to occupy the same political space...

...Even without the aggrieved hostility of Muslim scholars it would be no easy mystery to unravel...

...The first chapter alone is worth the cover price, for its brief history of how Islam came to be viewed so benignly and uncritically in the West...

...Christians in the West have been living with just such a scandal for at least the last two hundred years...

...He acts in his three most recent books as an anthologist of Koranic scholarship over the past century and as a popularizer of the work, published two decades ago, of John Wansbrough...

...All that was before the Yom Kippur War of 1973, the ensuing decades of Islamic terrorism, the fatwah pronounced against Salman Rushdie, and the events of September 11...

...Far from being the conspiracy of slanderers conjured up by Edward Said in his influential study, Orientalism (1978), Western historians from Gibbon to Foucault have acted to exonerate the Prophet and his believers...

...Yet the essence of the problem can be easily stated, and has been, in an essay by Herbert Berg: As Wansbrough notes, "Bereft of archaeological witness and hardly attested to in pre-Islamic Arabic or external sources, the seventh-century Hijaz [the area around Mecca] owes its historiographical existence almost entirely to the creative endeavor of Muslim and Orientalist scholarship...

...Hawt-ing, among them—and their works have been excerpted or summarized in one or another of Warraq's books...

...But, secure within his anonymity, War-raq dares to say those things that other Arabists can only hint at, or which they bury under truckloads of philological dust: that "Muhammad" was no Arab, that the Mecca from which he did not come did not exist at the time he wasn't there, that the Arab conquest of the Mediterranean preceded the establishment of the Islamic faith by a good two centuries, and that the Koran was compiled from a variety of sources in order to provide the far-flung conquered peoples with a suitably "Arabic" religion—a religion, that is, free of the taint of the rival monotheisms in which it had its source, and which, very often, Islam was supplanting...

...Is Islam, as President Bush has hopefully declared, just like Christianity and Judaism in its love of peace and yearning for brotherhood...

...Insofar as he did not himself act to make his work more widely accessible to a general readership, he assisted in keeping the shutters drawn and the cobwebs undisturbed...

...Across the globe Islam has a poor track record (which Warraq documents in many chapters of Why I Am Not a Muslim) at addressing the essential civilizing task of learning to tolerate other points of view and to join the West in a common era in which scholarship is not a hazardous occupation...

...In short, the Dark Ages of Islam are a good deal darker than those of the West, and through all the years that the Sword of Islam was busy subduing the Near East and the Mediterranean, there were no written records of Muhummad that survive, no mention of the Koran—only hearsay assertions many times removed, in later sources...

...It is best to read Warraq's four books in the order they were published...

...If there is to be a true "clash of civilizations," Wansbrough's theories are the literary equivalent of the explosives that brought down the two ancient Buddhas in Afghanistan...

...century after his death—if, indeed, there ever was such a person...

...That is to say, all Islamicists acknowledge that all the information we have about the first two centuries of Islam come from compilations and writings whose present recensions date from little earlier than the third Islamic century (i.e., 800 C.E...

...My reaction to the holy text was more along the lines of ho-hum than gosh-wow (I could find nothing to compare to the poetry of Job or the epic grandeur of the Ramayana...

...Islam's Foundation The Search for the Historical Muhammad BY THOMAS M. DISCH Living as an expatriate in Rome in the early 1970s, I came to know a young Arabist studying at the Vatican Library, who amazed me during the course of a long holiday banquet by explaining that the received wisdom among most nonMuslim scholars was that the Koran, far from being the work of Muhammad, had been compiled well over a Thomas M. Disch is a novelist whose latest work in progress is "Mecca: A Vision of the Next Crusade...

...For prudential reasons Warraq writes under an assumed name, and his publisher tells us only that he was born in the Middle East and lives and teaches in America...

...With Islamic fundamentalists— inspired by a zealotry that seems conscienceless and unremitting—calling for a holy war against Western civilization, it has become germane to inquire into the subject proposed by the title of Ibn Warraq's latest book, What the Koran Really Says...

...The double standard by which the West is denounced for its imperialism while Islam refuses to recognize the rudiments of international law has reached its pinnacle in the responses to September 11...

...Against Warraq's phalanx of learned demolition experts, orthodox Islamicists have little recourse but to denounce Warraq as a hostile witness and to sneer, as one critic does in the pages of the Middle East Studies Association Bulletin, that he has not "the honesty or courage to divulge his identity...

...In short, the Koran's texts (there are various "Korans," often in conflict with each other) are chiefly a scandal and an intellectual embarrassment as the basis of an examined religious faith...

...All that stands in the way of such an un-meeting of the minds is the natural human reluctance on the part of all but the most fiercely inquisitive in the West to pursue the arduous trail of clues mapped by these scholars...

...It would be wise to take Ibn Warraq's crash course in the subject before answering that question...

...Worse still from the Islamicist point of view, the arguments they shy away from are not uniquely Warraq's methods and theories...

...It came to a crisis during the Victorian era as the educated middle classes of Europe and America shared scholarship's "quest for the historic Jesus...

...Little wonder then that when Khomeini pronounced his fatwah against Rushdie many Western intellectuals joined him in reprobating Rushdie for his "blasphemy...

...His three earlier books—Why I Am Not a Muslim (1995), The Origins of the Koran (1998), and The Quest for the Historical Muhammad (2000)—constitute a unique resource for Western readers seeking an overview of Islam that is informed, forthright, and undaunted by the likelihood of an extremely hostile reception among orthodox Islamic scholars, for whom any murmur of criticism can be a casus belli...

...Since that string of dire events, understanding the history of Islam is no longer another easily shirked intellectual duty, but a matter of immediate and pressing concern...

...Further, its Arabic is often ungrammatical to the point of incoherence, thus lending it to a history of tendentious "interpretations...

...But the notion that the Prophet might be no more than a figure in an Islamic foundation legend, a poetic creation like Romulus and Remus, was startling, for my sense of the matter (absorbed as a college undergraduate) was that promulgated by the nineteenth-century historian of religion Ernest Renan, who held that "in place of the mystery under which the other religions have covered their origins, Islam was born in the full light of history...

...If these assertions are submitted to close textual analysis, using the tools of modern philology that have been used in the study of the Bible, what remains is a text riddled with inconsistencies and evidence of repeated tampering, a text with clear-cut borrowings from Judaic, Christian, and even Zoroastrian sources...

...While such questions have their undeniable fascination, they can't rival the themes of his first book, Why I Am Not a Muslim, for the power to instruct, dismay, and shock...

...Tell it not in Gath, publish it not A in the streets of Askelon...

...That Wansbrough's work should have remained so obscure in the decades since his Quranic Studies of 1977 and Sectarian Milieu of 1978 suggests that it was written primarily for Arabic scholars, an audience who for the most part responded first with a shudder of horror and then a prudential silence...

...There are scholars who have taken their cue from Wansbrough—Patricia Crone, Michael Cook, and G.R...

...I had read a brief life of the Prophet and some few selections from the Koran chosen to inculcate an irenic respect...

...That seems to be the worst his enemies can come up with by way of contesting his methods and theories, for they offer no rebuttal to arguments that will strike most impartial readers as persuasive...