Cardinal George Pell on Islam

Cardinal George Pell, Archbishop of Sydney, made a speech to the Legatus Summit, Naples, Florida on the 2nd of February, which has only now been put on the diocesan website. The speech is entitled 'Islam and Western Democracies', and is a wide-ranging overview of Islamic history and theology and our capacity to react to it.

Pell is no softly-spoken diplomat. For example,

In my own reading of the Koran, I began to note down invocations to violence. There are so many of them, however, that I abandoned this exercise after 50 or 60 or 70 pages.

He is not soft on the West, either, though here his points are those you'd expect from a man of the church.

Western secularists regularly have trouble understanding religious faith in their own societies, and are often at sea when it comes to addressing the meaninglessness that secularism spawns. An anorexic vision of democracy and the human person is no match for Islam.

A powerful sentence that last one.

I'm not going to attempt a summary of Pell's speech. I'd just like to note two pieces of information that help to explain a lot. The first regards the binary attribute, 'religion of peace/war'. Defenders of both camps seem to be armed with large stocks of suras. There's a good reason for this.

It is important to bear in mind what the scholars tell us about the difference between the suras (or chapters) of the Koran written during Muhammad’s thirteen years in Mecca, and those that were written after he had based himself at Medina. Irenic interpretations of the Koran typically draw heavily on the suras written in Mecca, when Muhammad was without military power and still hoped to win people, including Christians and Jews, to his revelation through preaching and religious activity. After emigrating to Medina, Muhammad formed an alliance with two Yemeni tribes and the spread of Islam through conquest and coercion began. One calculation is that Muhammad engaged in 78 battles, only one of which, the Battle of the Ditch, was defensive. The suras from the Medina period reflect this decisive change and are often held to abrogate suras from the Meccan period.

[By the way, 'irenic' means conducive to peace. I had to look it up, too.] Isn't that interesting, and utterly credible. When you are weak, you persuade; when you are strong, you command. Simple, and as old as Adam.

And then there's this.

In 2004 a scholar who writes under the pseudonym Christoph Luxenberg published a book in German setting out detailed evidence that the original language of the Koran was a dialect of Aramaic known as Syriac. Syriac or Syro-Aramaic was the written language of the Near East during Muhammad’s time, and Arabic did not assume written form until 150 years after his death. Luxenberg argues that the Koran that has come down to us in Arabic is partially a mistranscription of the original Syriac. A bizarre example he offers which received some attention at the time his book was published is the Koran’s promise that those who enter heaven will be “espoused” to “maidens with eyes like gazelles”; eyes, that is, which are intensely white and black (suras 4454 and 5220). Luxenberg’s meticulous analysis suggests that the Arabic word for maidens is in fact a mistranscription of the Syriac word for grapes. This does strain common sense. Valiant strivings to be consoled by beautiful women is one thing, but to be heroic for a packet of raisins seems a bit much!

Did you clock that? "Arabic did not assume written form until 150 years after his death." By which time, the Arab Empire was just short of Spain in the west and reached to Persia in the east. No wonder nobody can go to town (hermeneutically speaking) on the Koran without risking decapitation. We are speaking here of 2 translations: from Arabic into Syriac, and then several generations later, back from Syriac into Arabic. Since no Syriac version survives, the book is more removed from its source than the New Testament is. As a field for textual exploration and disruption, it is wide open (save for the decapitation).

Further.

Even more explosively, Luxenberg suggests that the Koran has its basis in the texts of the Syriac Christian liturgy, and in particular in the Syriac lectionary, which provides the origin for the Arabic word “koran”. As one scholarly review observes, if Luxenberg is correct the writers who transcribed the Koran into Arabic from Syriac a century and a half after Muhammad’s death transformed it from a text that was “more or less harmonious with the New Testament and Syriac Christian liturgy and literature to one that [was] distinct, of independent origin”.

Do you get the impression of a culture in aspic, kept hermetically sealed? The scholarly interrogation that Christianity was put through in the 19th century has barely begun with Islam. It seems about time.

(via Dinocrat)

Tagged: Islam, Religion, Culture