For Plato: reading history and Harry Potter

Submitted by dhimmi no more (United States), Feb 18, 2007 at 07:31

And here is your history lesson for today:

Any text we read only tells us what the author of the text believed happened but it does not mean that this is indeed the answer to the question that pre-occupies historians and it is: "What really heppened?" In other words the only way that we can approach texts is through _Literay Criticism_. If you ever believe what is in a text: you have a big time problem.

Now for the past 100 years historians of early Islam came to the realization that Muhammad's biography is unhistorical and must be ragrarded as another form of tafseer (exegesis) of the circulating Quranic logias and pericopes.

As for the hadith: All of the hadith literature is bogus and anachronistic unless proven otherwise, and the hadith literature must be viewed as a reflection of the religious, legal, social and cultural aspirations of the Muslims community in the 3rd cenutry of Islam or the time when the hadith literature was composed and no hadith can be linked to the historical Muhammad (see Ignaz Goldziher) .

The Qur'an itself is a flat text and it does not have the rich deposits that you will have in other great world literature as in the case of the BIble, the Tripitaka, The Upanishads the Avistas etc....And you know what? The Qur'an is nothing but poor literature.

The so called genre of tarikh or Islamic history is nothing but topoi and schema and much of it is unhistorical (for more details see Noth's Quellenkritische)

So your little debate here with our dear Sohail betrays your total ignorance of how to approach literature.

Reading Muslim sources is not unlike reaing Harry Potter! both must be appraoched through literary criticism of the primary source in its primary language and in this case Arabic which you do not know.

Note: Opinions expressed in comments are those of the authors alone and not necessarily those of Daniel Pipes. Original writing only, please. Comments are screened and in some cases edited before posting. Reasoned disagreement is welcome but not comments that are scurrilous, off-topic, commercial, disparaging religions, or otherwise inappropriate. For complete regulations, see the "Guidelines for Reader Comments".