My friend, the pseudonymous author Spengler , sends this note for posting on the First Things blog :
Andrew Higgins’ January 11 report in the Wall Street Journal of the re-discovery of a Koranic manuscript archive long thought lost has prompted hundreds of blog comments. It is a momentous find, for German Koranic scholars before World War II had photographed ancient copies of Islamic texts before the Nazis shut down the project. It has long been known that variant copies of the Koran exist, including some found in 1972 in a paper grave in Yemen, the subject of a cover story in the January 1999 Atlantic Monthly . Many scholars believe that the German archive, which includes photocopies of manuscripts as old as A.D. 700, will provide more evidence of variation in the Koran.
The history of the archive reads like an Islamic version of The Da Vinci Code . It is not clear why its existence was occulted for sixty years, or why it has come to light now, or when scholars will have free access to it. Higgins’ account begins,
On the night of April 24, 1944, British air force bombers hammered a former Jesuit college here housing the Bavarian Academy of Science. The 16th-century building crumpled in the inferno. Among the treasures lost, later lamented Anton Spitaler, an Arabic scholar at the academy, was a unique photo archive of ancient manuscripts of the Quran.The 450 rolls of film had been assembled before the war for a bold venture: a study of the evolution of the Quran, the text Muslims view as the verbatim transcript of God’s word. The wartime destruction made the project “outright impossible,” Mr. Spitaler wrote in the 1970s.
Mr. Spitaler was lying. The cache of photos survived, and he was sitting on it all along. The truth is only now dribbling out to scholars—and a Quran research project buried for more than 60 years has risen from the grave.
Why Spitaler concealed the archive is unknown, but Koranic critics who challenge the received Muslim account suspect his motives. Higgins reports,
“The whole period after 1945 was poisoned by the Nazis,” says Günter Lüling, a scholar who was drummed out of his university in the 1970s after he put forward heterodox theories about the Quran’s origins. His doctoral thesis argued that the Quran was lifted in part from Christian hymns. Blackballed by Mr. Spitaler, Mr. Lüling lost his teaching job and launched a fruitless six-year court battle to be reinstated. Feuding over the Quran, he says, “ruined my life.”He wrote books and articles at home, funded by his wife, who took a job in a pharmacy. Asked by a French journal to write a paper on German Arabists, Mr. Lüling went to Berlin to examine wartime records. Germany’s prominent postwar Arabic scholars, he says, “were all connected to the Nazis.”
It may be a very long time before the contents of the archive are known, however, for some Koranic critics claim that Prof. Angelika Neuwirth, the archive’s custodian, has denied access to scholars who stray from the traditional interpretation. A number of bloggers report complaints dating back to 2002 that the existence of the photographic archive was well known to specialists, but that Neuwirth refused access.
Although Neuwirth will have nothing to do with Koranic critics who dispute the traditional Muslim account, she has stepped on academic land mines herself. “Ms. Neuwirth, though widely regarded as respectful of Islamic tradition, got sideswiped by Arab suspicion of Western scholars. She was fired from a teaching post in Jordan, she says, for mentioning a radical revisionist scholar during a lecture in Germany,” reports Higgins in the WSJ.
Not only the background, but the content of the story recalls the Da Vinci code. The existence of variant versions of the Koran would be as unacceptable to Islam as the notion that the Christ of the gospels was a composite of several individuals would be to Christianity. The Encyclopaedia of Islam observes, “the closest analogue in Christian belief to the role of the Kur’an in Muslim belief is not the Bible, but Christ.” The salvation event in Islam is the dictation of the Koran to Mohammed by the Archangel Gabriel. Islam has neither Exodus nor Resurrection, but rather a book that represents God’s presence on earth.
