"Late Antique Qur'an" Lecture by Angelika Neuwirth

Submitted by dhimmi no more (United States), Sep 15, 2018 at 09:25

Dr. Pipes

I wish to share with you and your readers this lecture (2012) by two outstanding scholars of the Qur'an and early Islam: The late Patricia Crone and Angelika Neuwirth.

For the readers; You do not need to know Arabic or Syriac or Hebrew to be able to understand Neuwirth's lecture

Peters once said that "The Qur'an is text with no context" and this is indeed a real problem in the study of early Islam and of the Qur'an. We only have tendentious texts written almost 2-3 centuries after the death of Muhammad The Qur'an is of no help as a guide to the life of the prophet of Islam. As a matter of fact it is impossible to understand what the Qur'an is really saying without reading the commentaries by al-mufasereen. al-Ahadith? they are anachronistic and indeed Muslims early on realized the unreliability of the Ahadith and this is why the Isnads were introduced. So we are left with not much that can tell us about what really happened in al-Hijaz in the 7th century

Neuwirth highlights the state of the art as it stands now. And indeed she implicitly seems to agrees with John Wansbrough that Islam is an extension of the Judeo-Christian tradition (Wansbrough pointed out the fact that the author of the Qur'an assumed that the reader must be familiar with Biblical narratives).

However, we still do not know what the Qur'an is really saying! She also makes it clear that today's Cairo Qur'an (1923-1924) is not based on manuscripts but on recitation which is really tragic

Here is the video

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qHCeYSvazY4

Again for the readers: Do not expect Neuwirth to solve the puzzles surrounding the Qur'an or early Islam

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