An Unvowelled Qur'an...With Vowels!

Well sometimes you just have to laugh at the incompetence of these Islamophobic clowns—especially the ones who author books while remaining not only painfully ignorant of their subject matter, but horribly bigoted. Well lucky for me (and my readers), I've found an example of this that's easy enough to demonstrate. The other day, I was in a local bookstore flipping through a copy of Discovering God: The Origins of the Great Religions and the Evolution of Belief, by Rodney Stark, when this claim on page 361 caught my eye:

"A page from the Qur'an. For all that it is beautiful, this traditional Arabic script lacks short vowels, which often causes confusion as to which of several possible words actually is intended."

Unfortunately for this obviously ignorant author, the Qur'anic text pictured in the book is clearly vowelled! Yes, indeed, the image shows a portion of Surah As-Saffat (Qur'an 37) which includes most of ayah 35, all of ayah 36, and most of ayah 37, and there are many a fatha, damma and kisra (i.e. Arabic "short vowels") clearly visible in the text—as well as many occurrences of other diacritical marks (i.e. sukun and shadda) as well.

Admittedly, the Qur'anic manuscript in question is written in Maghribi script, which is mostly used in North and West Africa, thus the vowels are written as horizontal slashes rather than the more common slanted ones...but any Arabic reader can see that they are very plainly there. The fact that other idiosyncrasies of the Maghribi script can also be seen in this image (i.e. no dot over a terminal nun, one dot instead of two over a qaf, and no dots over a terminal qaf), does not take away from the fact that it is very much a vowelled text.

And let me make it clear: I am not disputing Stark's claim (page 362) that "there are no short vowels and no diacritics in the earliest surviving texts" but only demonstrating that the author was so inept that he chose for his example a text which has both short vowels and diacritics. For a brief discussion of the vowelling of the earliest Qur'anic manuscripts, please see The Qur'anic Manuscripts page at Islamic-Awareness.org—which clearly demonstrates that Qur'anic manuscripts from the first century of Islam exist in much more abundance (and are much more accurate!) than New Testament manuscripts from the first century of Christianity. Needless to say, Mr. Stark's attempts to defend the integrity and reliability of the New Testament text in the book in question are both vacuous and laughable. Reading such material makes it ominously clear that Rodney Stark is not a disinterested scholar, but rather a religions propagandist. One wonders where the commandment "Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbour" fits into all of this...

A glaring mistake as described above is much easier to understand once one actually reads what the author writes about Islam in the main text of the book. Suffice it to say, in spite of the fact that the Wikipedia entry on Rodney Stark says that one of his "hallmarks is writing with respect about the religions he studies", it becomes quickly apparent that he is more than willing to twist historical material to fit his pre-conceived and bigoted notions. I will let two examples suffice: 1) On the same page of Discovering God that shows the Qur'anic image we've just discussed, he writes: "When Muhammad died unexpectedly in 632, apparently there was no written Qur'an"; and 2) he has a book entitled The Victory of Reason: How Christianity Led to Freedom, Capitalism, and Western Success—which seems to indicate that Mr. Stark could very well be reading history with one eye closed and a crack pipe in hand.

If you want to see the copyrighted Qur'anic image from the book in question, just do the following: 1) Login to Amazon.com; 2) go to the main page for Discovering God: The Origins of the Great Religions and the Evolution of Belief, by Rodney Stark; 3) click on Search inside this book; 4) enter "vowels" in the blank search field; 5) click on the Go button; and 6) once the results appear, click "on Page 361".

Maybe I can be faulted for picking on an easy target—and Islamophobic troglodytes like Stark seem to be a dime a dozen these days, but such activist authors just bring it upon themselves. When I get time, I might post more examples of the egregious errors and blatant distortions in the writings of Rodney Stark. For now, however, this will have to suffice as an exposé of his sheer buffoonery...

Grammatical Errors in the Qur'an?

It was always patently obvious to me, even before I became a Muslim, that those who alleged that there are grammatical errors in the Qur'an not only had an ax to grind, but were making a rather objective claim regarding a subject that was at least somewhat subjective. Likewise, not only were they essentially guilty of "putting the cart before the horse", since the agreed upon grammatical rules which they relied upon to uncover alleged errors were largely formulated from Classical Arabic sources (including the Qur'an itself) years after the Qur'an was revealed, but they all seem to have conveniently forgotten that linguistic experts and authorities largely recognize that there is such a thing as "poetic license"—especially in books that claim to be unique and original (as the Qur'an indeed does). Those who are interested in reading a much more detailed discussion of this subject, one that clearly exposes the flawed approach that Orientalists have historically had with the Qur'an, please take a look at:

Orienting the Orientalists

And if you wan to learn even more about the biased and unfair treatment the Qur'an has suffered at the hands of Orientalists over the centuries, please read Method Against Truth: Orientalism and Qur'anic Studies and Orientalism, Misinformation and Islam.

Enjoy...

The Common Cause of Bernard Lewis and Usama bin Laden

Here's a thought-provoking article by S. Parvez Manzoor in which he serves up a nice dose of the painful truth. It seems to be based on a lecture that he gave in the not too distant past, although I've been unable to determine when or where. Personally, I could do without the untranslated German words, and for those of you who feel likewise, Gesellschaft is usually translated as "society" and Gemeinschaft as "community". I'm not going to provide any hints as to what my hopefully thought-provoking title is getting at, since I want to encourage everyone to read the article in order to find an answer...

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From Gesellschaft to Gemeinschaft:
or
Engagement beyond Dialogue

by S. Parvez Manzoor

The senseless violence and terror of our times has acquired an 'Islamic' face. Rather than as faith, civilization or culture, Islam is now perceived, thanks to the umpteen mechanisms of representation that our civilization commands, as the ideology of Islamism. But most lamentably for an age that prides its secularity, Islam now provides an excuse for the return of the Manichaean rhetoric in the language of politics. Little wonder that all uncontrollable passions today either have to do with the assertion of Islam or with its containment.

Naturally, this both grieves and perplexes ordinary Muslims, the overwhelming majority, who feel appalled by this secular transubstantiation of a sacred faith into a politics of immediate return. It grieves us because the messianic violence perpetrated in the name of Islam represents a total negation of the Islamic values. It perplexes us because, though carried out in the name of jihad, the doctrine of inner struggle, purification and penance, the Jihad of our zealots is, like the worst caricature of the Islamophobic imagination: it is little more than an 'ideology of holy war'. Its champions are far too willing to sacrifice, at the altar of their home-grown politics of parochial causes, primeval passions and selfendorsing piety, every vestige of Islamic faith, reason, compassion and law! Little wonder that divorced both from Islamic ethics and its juristic norms, cut off from all sources of Islam's humanity and morality, the jihadi enterprise can only redeem itself in the moral wasteland of modern nihilism.

Though saddened and perplexed, we find little comfort in discovering that the Islamic face of terror is nothing but a secular mask; that our jihadis are, in terms of their methods and tactics at least, direct disciples of the revolutionary anarchists of late nineteenth-century Europe. Or, as has been expressed far less circumspectly: "If Osama bin Laden has a precursor; it is the nineteenth century Russian terrorist Sergei Nechaev."¹ Like Communism and Nazism, then, radical Islamism is a modern heresy.

Far more difficult to dismiss, however, is the following statement which claims that 'the conflict between Al-Qaeda and the West is a war of religion. The Enlightenment idea of a universal civilization, which the West upholds against radical Islam, is an offspring of Christianity. Al-Qaeda's peculiar hybrid of theocracy and anarchy is a by-product of western radical thought. Each of the protagonists in the current conflict is driven by beliefs that are opaque to it.'² The globalisation regime promotes, we are made to believe, a passionate, tribal politics of difference as well as an overbearing imperial rule. Whether right or wrong, this sombre insight must compel us to seek a future beyond the logic of Terror and Empire. We must not allow ourselves to become hostages to the unleashing of opaque passions. This, I presume, is the rationale behind the present gathering. This, most certainly, is my reason for being here.

To move beyond the responsibility of dialogue is also to advance from the logic of Gesellshaft to the emotion of Gemeinschaft. The forces of modernity and globalisation, it is evident, are quite successful at the creation of a world gesellschaft, a network of economic, social and legal institutions that are universal in scope. Their contribution to the emergence of a world gemeinschaft, a human community united in the pursuit of common moral goals, is far less impressive. The search for a human community however entails a reflection on the problem of world-order; for, the moral and the political are quite simply impossible to disentangle in this discourse. By rejecting all theocratic and redemptive visions of global order, but at the same time pursuing a politics of common humanity, we can set definite limits and conditions for any dialogue between civilisations.

As a Muslim, therefore, I would like to exercise my right to question the credentials of 'political Islam'; its claim to represent my own tradition. I would openly challenge its cardinal assertion that in the Islamic scheme of things, religion and politics are one; that faith without a polity does not come to fruition. That there always exists, at a deeper level of consciousness, an organic link between worldviews and political goals, is not a point of contention. This, after all, is a trivial insight that is valid as much for Islam as for any other faith or civilisation. No, I question this claim when it comes with the label of Islamic specificity. Whether it be the war cry of a beleaguered fundamentalism or that of an equally intransigent Islamophobia, I challenge it on the grounds of history.

Only from the canons of a dogmatic theology may we envision one and a half millennia of Islamic history, in all the four corners of the ancient, medieval and modern worlds, as an eternal wandering in the no-man's land of spurious, sub-Islamic, existence! Or, conversely, the historical Muslim state, with its flagrant disregard of the Islamic rule and the manifestly 'un-Islamic' conduct of its rulers, could only have convinced the believers that it was an incarnation of their faith if they had been brain-dead! Clearly, Islam produced its own criteria for distinguishing norm from history, ideal from reality and power from authority. In fact, Islam succeeded in transforming itself into a civilization mainly by securing a separation of faith and governance. To claim therefore that Muslims were strangers to the logic of historical compromise, or that Islamic doctors always chose Divine Governance over Caesar's rule is to revel in a fundamentalist fantasy or to draw an Orientalist caricature. Ironically, in the propagation of this ahistorical vision, western scholars and Muslim radicals have found a common cause. It is here that we find Bernard Lewis in bed with Usama bin Laden!

The same goes for the claims about Islam's putative incompatibility with democracy or secularism. To take secularism first. Like a darling child secularism has many names. It has been conceived, either humbly, as a rejection of ecclesiastical authority, a model for pluralism, a theory of society, a doctrine of governance; or augustly, as a philosophy of history, a creed of atheism, an epistemology of humanism; or even more grandiosely, as a metaphysics of immanence that corresponds to the ultimate scheme of things. Needless to say, not everyone championing the cause of secularism ascribes to these claims, nor is every expression of the secularist, this-worldly, conscience and morality inimical or antithetical to Islam. As long as secularism does not lay claim to being a metaphysics, as a theory of 'all that is', inasmuch as it does not behave as if it were a doctrine of redemption (Heilslehre), Islam can cohabit with it. As for secularism being a form of government that guarantees freedom of religion in pluralistic societies, even Muslims find it preferable to the suppression of religious conscience that is hallmark of theocratic rule.³ At any rate, Islam's compatibility with secular politics may not remain an issue for long, for all politics is in some sense secular politics and if the Muslims aspire to become actors in history, they'll have to adapt to the ways of the world.

As for democracy, what militates against its growth in Muslim societies is not any hurdles set up by the Islamic doctrine, but the refusal of current regimes to grant their Muslim citizenry the most fundamental of rights - freedom of conscience and religion–which the secular state takes for granted. Secularism in the Muslim context is construed not as a formal separation of church and state but as an absolute ban on Islamic political conscience, an adamant denial of its right to partake in public debate and propose public policies–no matter how peacefully and 'democratically' this civic conscience articulates its societal aspirations! In the final analysis, it is not an issue of Islamic obduracy or militancy but that of the despotic, absolutist and undemocratic nature of the secular Muslim regimes (and the civilisation in power that sustains them). A democratic Muslim state, it is my belief, is better equipped to meet all the challenges of secular morality and appease all the demands of Islamic conscience!

Despite all the goodwill on the part of the part of our hosts, I fear, we may find ourselves in a situation where, paradoxically, engaging with the Islamic world is not the same as engaging with the Islamic conscience. While economic, diplomatic, strategic and other concerns would require that the logic of gesellschaft be predominant in this dialogue with 'official Islam', it is my hope that another encounter, within the warmth and congeniality of gemeinschaft, also takes place between the European Geist and the Islamic conscience; a conscience which is not bound by territoriality and whose quest for meaning stretches beyond the horizons of politics and history.

It is in this vein that I conclude by citing an eminent Historian of religion, W. C. Smith, whose words, fifty years after they were first uttered, have still not lost their actuality. He says: "If it is a question whether Islam can adjust itself to Western civilisation, it is also a question whether Western civilisation is able to develop so as to include Islam."⁴

Let's hope that our efforts to conduct a practical conversation, here and now, also help us discover a common moral ground and a sense of community which, according to the Islamic tradition, comes from being the children of Adam.⁵

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Notes
1. Gray, John: Al-Qaeda and What It Means to Be Modern. London, Faber and Faber, 2003. p 21.
2. Ibid. p. 117.
3. Bencheikh, Sohaib: Marianne et le Prophète. Paris, Bernard Grasset, 1998. The author who is the ‘mufti of Marseilles’ is critical of those French policies which do not fully extend the regime of laicité to Islam.
4. Smith, W.C.: Islam in Modern History. New York, Mentor Books, 1957. p. 217. Further, despite the apocalyptic mood of our times, some Western scholars are also pleading for a more inclusive and irenic attitude towards Islam. Vid. Bulliet, Richard: The Case for Islamo-Christian Civilization. New York, Columbia University press, 2004.
5. Koran: 33:72.

Orientalism and the Qur'an: "Born of Spite, Bred in Frustration"

Below is a link to, as well as some excerpts from, S. Parvez Manzoor's powerful exposé of Orientalism's on-going attempts to undermine the Qur'an. Anyone familiar with the attempts of John Wansbrough et al to cast doubts upon the early sources of Islam should find this lively essay a pleasure to read. It might be a bit late in the game and a tad triumphalist to still be kicking this dead horse, since these revisionist neo-Orientalist attacks on the Qur'an have been all been exposed as mere (and often very dishonest) conjecture that tried to proceed without solid facts (such as a wealth of 1st century Hijra manuscripts) getting in the way. In that regard, I can't help but mention a recently published book by Shaykh Muhammad M. Al-Azami entitled The History of the Qur'anic Text from Revelation to Compilation: A Comparative Study with the Old and New Testaments [Amazon.co.uk], which is a detailed, passionate, scholarly and uniquely illustrated refutation of Orientalist attacks on the Qur'an. I very, very highly recommend this book to anyone interested in this important discussion since this certainly is by far the best book on this subject in English—thus I suggest purchasing a copy as soon as possible, insha'llah. In the mean time, getting back to the original article, I also highly recommend pondering the following poignant vindication of the Qur'an:

Method against Truth: Orientalism and Qur'anic Studies
by S. Parvez Manzoor

“The Orientalist enterprise of Qur'anic studies, whatever its other merits and services, was a project born of spite, bred in frustration and nourished by vengeance: the spite of the powerful for the powerless, the frustration of the ‘rational' towards the ‘superstitious' and the vengeance of the ‘orthodox' against the ‘non-conformist'. At the greatest hour of his worldly-triumph, the Western man, coordinating the powers of the State, Church and Academia, launched his most determined assault on the citadel of Muslim faith.”

“That Orientalism was a naked discourse of power and that its epistemology was a crude charade of legitimizing ethnocentric arrogance, is no longer a point of contention with any knowledgeable student of Islam or of modern history.”

“Undoubtedly, within the matrix of linguistic, textual and chronological studies, the most ambitious project of Orientalist scholarship was to produce a ‘critical' text of the Qur'an. To a Muslim, uncompromisingly conditioned by the authority of the mutawatir tradition, such scholarly hubris strikes as suicidal, if not downright blasphemous. Such, however, is the lure of the ‘critical' approach for the Orientalist that everything that is normative and axiomatic for the Muslim tradition has to be rejected with impunity, even if it tolls the death of impartiality or of ‘scholarship'.”

“With Wansbrough, the triumph of method over truth is complete. Along with the bath water of Orientalist chronology, one now throws the baby of Islamic history as well. The Qur'an, thus unanchored from its historic moorings, now becomes amenable to any kind of methodological torture and the Orientalist scholar absolved of any chronological responsibility.”

“The divorce of history and method that is the seed of Wansbrough's literary analysis, however, is bringing mixed harvest to the, now largely abandoned, manor-house of Orientalism. If, on the one hand, there is a vanguard assault to pulverise the mansion of Islamic history into the rubble of ‘salvation history', most notably in the works of Patricia Croone and Michael Cooke, there is also, on the other hand, the growing evidence of reliability of the Muslim tradition.”

“Because of its foreign origin, its missionary trappings and its colonial designs, we have, rightly, dismissed Orientalism as the pathological fallacy of the Western religious, political and cultural megalomania. Nonetheless, we cannot remain immune forever against the claims of its method that are being proffered in the name of ‘universal' reason itself.”

Click here to read this entire article...

Bernard's Bigotry and the Truth About Muslims

The following article is an excellent and concise exposé of the bigoted scholarship of Bernard Lewis, including his unfortunate influence on the Bush Administration and the demise of his credibility in recent (i.e. Post-War Iraq) years.

The Truth About Muslims
by William Dalrymple
The New York Review of Books - November 4, 2004

A friend of mine has written some poignant reviews of some of Bernard Lewis' works, which are all too often on the shelves of your local bookstore these days. We're not trying to claim that Bernard Lewis is not knowledgeable, but only trying to make the point that his one-sided presentation of things seriously undermines the value of his scholarship. Anyone who has been duped into believing that Bernard Lewis is a Middle Eastern scholar worthy of respect should read all of these reviews:

• The Crisis of Bernard Lewis
  (A review of The Crisis of Islam: Holy War and Unholy Terror)
• What Went Wrong With Bernard Lewis?
  (A review of What Went Wrong: Western Impact and Middle Eastern Response)
• Decent, But Deplorably One-Sided
  (A review of Semites and Anti-Semites: An Inquiry into Conflict and Prejudice)

Enjoy...

Reflections on Islam from Harvard

I've held William A. Graham in high regard ever since reading his Beyond the Written Word: Oral Aspects of Scripture in the History of Religion, in which he refutes contemporary skeptics who downplay the veracity of the oral tradition of scripture not only in Judaism, Christianity and Islam, but in other religious traditions as well. The following is a transcript of a lecture that Dr. Graham gave last year at Harvard Divinity School:

Reflections on Islam in a Time of Global Uncertainty
by William A. Graham

His thoughts are well worth reading, since he not only takes on the "Clash of Civilizations" thesis of Samuel Huntington, but addresses general Islamophobia as well. In this age of ignorance about and bigotry towards Islam, we could use a lot more erudite, balanced and fair-minded scholars like William A. Graham.

Bernard Lewis - Scholar Combatant

Scholar Combatant
November 17, 2004