Interview with Prof. Suleiman Mourad on the changes to early Islam
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Link https//newleftreview.org/II/86/suleiman-mourad-riddles-of-the-book?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=NLR86
Whilst this is a really interesting read, I must say that a lot of what was said in this article bothered me.
Prof. Mourad is a respected academic in this field, but he made a few outright errors in this interview, as well as some pretty astounding unsupported statements.
Issues
The language of the text is clearly evolving, some words dropping out completely, and new ones emerging. There are also some basic grammatical mistakes in the Qur?an?sometimes a sentence starts in the singular and ends in the plural, some vowels go wrong in the declensions. This is from the viewpoint of the linguist; from the traditional vantage point, since the Qur?an is miraculous, these are not errors. It is important to point out here that when the official canonical text was put together around 650, the committee opted to arrange the Qur?an in decreasing order, starting with the longest chapters and ending with the shortest. They put a short opening chapter at the beginning, and scholars in the first few centuries debated whether this was actually part of the Qur?an or not.
When the Great Mosque in Sana?a was being renovated in the early 1970s, a secret attic was discovered above a false ceiling, containing a mass of old manuscripts. ... A German scholar was allowed to study the finds, but she has published very little on them for fear of the political consequences of doing so; it seems the Yemeni government threatened Germany with repercussions if anything embarrassing appeared. But from a few of what are believed to be very early parchments in the cache, using Kufic script, we know that they date to the late seventh or early eighth century, and we can already see one significant difference with the canonical version of the Qur?an. The traditional story tells us there were no serious variations between the different versions assembled by Caliph ?Uthman around the year 650, though we know that down to the eighth century more popular versions of the Qur?an, without major discrepancies from the canonical text, were retained in certain regions?Iraq or Syria?out of local pride. The Yemeni manuscript, however, contains a very serious divergence. In the canonical Qur?an, there is a verse with the imperative form ?say? ?God instructing Muhammad?whereas in the San?a text, the same verse reads ?he said? . That suggests some early Muslims may have perceived the Qur?an as the word of the Prophet, and it was only some time later that his reported speech became a divine command. There is also some serious variation with respect to the size of some chapters.
How coherent is the Qur?an itself?
Coherence is a modern criterion. Any medieval text is full of contradictions. When a writer makes a case, he musters all the arguments needed to support it, and then he moves to another topic, using arguments to make a case that might contradict what he said a few pages earlier. So there are plenty of contradictions in the Qur?an, and in basic laws supposedly derived from it.
Countless Muslim modernists in Egypt, India and elsewhere wanted to go Protestant-style, sola scriptura, just by the Qur?an as God?s word. But they all realized that they have no recourse to understand the Qur?an on its own without the life of the Prophet. Thus all the problems of classical Islam were brought back into modern Islam.
Errors
There are larger contradictions than this. For instance, the Qur?an tells us that marriage for pleasure?mut?a?is acceptable. When warriors went out to fight, they could contract carnal unions with women for a period of a week, in a kind of formal marriage that was annulled after seven days. Caliph ?Umar banned this practice. So Sunnis don?t practise it, because ?Umar forbade it, even though the Qur?an allows it.
Then there is punishment for adultery. The Qur?an says the penalty is stoning, in line with Jewish tradition, but it became a hundred lashes. If the Qur?an is a revealed text whose prescriptions Muslims should adopt, why is there so much in Shari?a that is contrary to the Qur?an? The answer is that for Muslims, the Qur?an is actually not the number-one source of guidance for conduct. For Sunnis, it is the Sunna of the Prophet, which is spread across various massive compilations, and is complemented with an even bigger body of opinions by major early figures sanctioned by Sunnism.
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I've read the article and found it very interesting, and I appreciated the civilized and moderate tone and stile of his exposition. Nevertheless, I do not have expertise or enough knowledge to notice his flaws. Since history doesn't interest me so much, I merely expected he would say more about authenticity of the Qur'an, or give some proofs about its divinity.
Peace
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Well he's an academic, and that's not what academics do. They study religion from a historical, social, and anthropological point of view to explain why religions were founded and how they changed over time. If he came out and said "God wrote it" he'd be a laughing stock and lose his job.
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If he is making errors like the examples you pointed out I don't give him much credibility.
As a side note, I often find it interesting when people point out so-called big errors in Quran, but are rarely specific, and the ones they do point out are minor, or have never been cross-referenced to check if they can be cleared up. To me, this suggests, they've actually found very few problems with it.
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Historians glorify lies.
Prof. Mourad's biography http//sophia.smith.edu/~smourad/Introduction.htmMy adviser/professor studied in Columbia university and Yale. He wrote tons of papers that are hard to understand, but look all wise and credible. But during his lectures, he showed his iq level. He thinks Google spies on him through adsense and Duck Duck Go is free of biases and inspiration from Google.
