History Of Quran Scholars

"It seems to be the first duty of a historian to investigate the causes of great revolutions; for an event which happens at any other, but its due season, is a miracle : we should consider it as a wonder, if the sun should rise one second before, or after its appointed hour; or if any one were to accomplish, in his childhood, what is expected of him in his ripe age."

"“for every event which took place in the life of Muhammad, Ibn Ishaq meticulously recorded in his Sira in which month it took place,” and “this meticulous and systematic dating by month which is Ibn Ishaq’s wont, is, of course, one of the main reasons why Western historians classified his book as historiography in the normal sense of that word.”... “How then,” asks Jansen, “is it possible that not a single one of the numerous events Ibn Ishaq describes and attaches a date to, took place during a leap month? If his narrative of the life of Muhammad would be based on historical memories and on real events, however distorted, but remembered by real people, how can half a solar year (or more) remain unmentioned and have disappeared from the record?”... Ibn Ishaq/Ibn Hisham’s biography, Jansen observes, “can only date from a period in which people had forgotten that leap months had once existed.”... “These stories by Ibn Ishaq,” concludes Jansen, “do not attempt to describe memories of events that took place in the past, but they want to convince the reader that the protagonist of these stories, Muhammad, is the Messenger of God.”59"

"Since external evidence is necessary to corroborate a view derived solely from the Muslim literary account, lack of such corroboration is an important argument against that account's historicity. This approach is therefore more open than the 'traditional' to acceptance of an argumentum e silentio. For if we are ready to discount an uncorroborated report of an event, we must accept that there may be nothing with which to replace it: that the event simply did not happen. That there is no evidence for it outside of the "traditional account" thus becomes positive evidence in support of the hypothesis that it did not happen. A striking example is the lack of evidence, outside the Muslim literature, for the view that the Arabs were Muslim at the time of the Conquest."

"There is no Muslim literature which can be dated, in the form in which it is available to us, earlier than 800 C.E."

"Not only the greater part of the religious vocabulary, but also most of the cultural vocabulary of the Quran is of non-Arabic origin."

"At his birth Muhammad had received the name Qutham, but since the Book of Allah had given him the name Ahmad and Muhammad, the Tradition, with a slightly apologetic ulterior motive, wants to hear of no other."

"On the whole, while many parts of the Koran undoubtedly have considerable rhetorical power, even over an unbelieving reader, the book, æsthetically considered, is by no means a first-rate performance... Mohammed, in short, is not in any sense a master of style. This opinion will be endorsed by any European who reads through the book with an impartial spirit and some knowledge of the language, without taking into account the tiresome effect of its endless iterations. But in the ears of every pious Moslem such a judgment will sound almost as shocking as downright atheism or polytheism. Among the Moslems, the Koran has always been looked on as the most perfect model of style and language. This feature of it is in their dogmatic the greatest of all miracles, the incontestable proof of its divine origin. Such a view on the part of men who knew Arabic infinitely better than the most accomplished European Arabist will ever do, may well startle us. In fact, the Koran boldly challenged its opponents to produce ten súras, or even a single one, like those of the sacred book, and they never did so. That, to be sure, on calm reflection, is not so very surprising. Revelations of the kind which Mohammed uttered, no unbeliever could produce without making himself a laughing-stock."

"As Crone puts it, “It is obvious that if the Meccans had been middlemen in a long-distance trade of the kind described in the secondary literature”—that is, works by Watt and other historians who take for granted the canonical Islamic account—“there ought to have been some mention of them in the writings of their customers. Greek and Latin authors had, after all, written extensively about the south Arabians who supplied them with aromatics in the past, offering information about their cities, tribes, political organization, and caravan trade.”"

"“The political and ecclesiastical importance of Arabia in the sixth century was such that considerable attention was paid to Arabian affairs, too; but of Quraysh and their trading center there is no mention at all, be it in the Greek, Latin, Syriac, Aramaic, Coptic, or other literature composed outside Arabia before the conquests. This silence is striking and significant.” Specifically, she says, “Nowhere is it stated that Quraysh, or the ‘Arab kings,’ were the people who used to supply such-and-such regions with such-and-such goods: it was only Muhammad himself who was known to have been a trader.”"

"It is my belief that the early descriptions of Mecca and its mountains do not fit the Mecca of today."

"It is not just on the level of simple isolated words but also at the level of syntax that the Arab commentators have misunderstood the Koranic text, to the extent of misinterpreting entire suras."

"The text of the Koran as transmitted by Muslim Orthodoxy contains, hidden behind it as a ground layer and considerably scattered throughout it (together about one-third of the whole Koran text), an originally pre- Islamic Christian text.” Earlier Qur’anic scholars such as Alois Sprenger and Tor Andrae have also identified a Christian substratum."

"Lüling sees traces of the Christian controversies over the nature of Christ in the Qur’an’s denunciations of those who associate partners with Allah. Lüling sees the Muslim charge that the pagan Quraysh of Mecca were mushrikun, those who associated others with Allah in worship, as an indication that they had actually converted to orthodox Trinitarian Christianity, thereby reinforcing their rejection of Islam’s hardline monotheism and rejection of Christ’s divinity. As the Islamic faith began to develop as a distinct religion, it decisively rejected this faith in Christ and reinterpreted the Qur’an to fit its developing new theology. The hanifs, who were overwhelmed by the coming of Islam and its success, were the last remnants of those who held to creedally vague monotheism."

"The simplest means by which honest men sought to combat the rapid increase of faked hadiths is at the same time a most remarkable phenomenon in the history of literature. With pious intention fabrications were combated with new fabrications, with new hadiths which were smuggled in and in which the invention of illegitimate hadiths were condemned by strong words uttered by the Prophet."

"Ibn Warraq's book will either be ignored with deadly thoroughness or cause an enormous riot."

"Nothing from the contents of Ibn Ishaq is confirmed by inscriptions or other archeological material. Testimonies from non-Muslim contemporaries do not exist. Greek, Armenian, Syriac and other sources about the beginnings of Islam are very difficult to date, but none of them is convincingly contemporary with the Prophet of Islam. Under such circumstances, no biography can be a scholarly work in the modern sense of that word, not even with the help of an omniscient Ibn Ishaq."

"Julius Wellhausen (1844-1918) abandoned his professorship in Theology when he realized that his uncompromisingly secularist reading of the Bible was incompatible with the job of preparing students for a career as Christian ministers. He shifted to Oriental Philology in order to have the freedom to go where his scholarly insights into scripture took him. His great legacy is a candid demythologizing approach to the Bible as a piece of human literature rather than the Word of God. Among other things, his contribution was decisive in establishing the distinction between four editorial traditions that together constitute the Biblical text."

"Though he was opposed mostly by traditional Christians, later detractors have tried to overrule the German professor's findings with the imputation of anti-Jewish motives. I have not seen any evidence for that all too predictable allegation. It would in any case make no difference: the truth of a scholarly hypothesis is not dependent on the motives of its proponents. Sometimes people say the truth for the wrong reasons, just as untruths are sometimes believed and propagated by people with the nicest of motives. So, I salute Wellhausen as a pioneering Orientalist, an explorer and map-maker of religion as a human construct rather than a divine revelation."

"[t]he idea of religious law—the concept that law, as well as the other human relationships, must be ruled by religion—has become an essential part of the Islamic outlook. The same, incidentally, is true of politics, and even economics; it explains the recent attempt to hold an Islamic economic congress in Pakistan. Because they cannot face the problem, because they lack historical understanding of the formation of Mohammedan religious law, because they cannot make up their minds, any more than their predecessors could in the early Abbasid period [which began 750 CE], on what is legislation, the modernists cannot get away from a timid, halfhearted, and essentially self-contradictory position... The real problem poses itself at the religious and not at the technically legal level."

"Even the classical corpus... contains a great many traditions which cannot possibly be authentic. All efforts to extract from this often self-contradictory mass an authentic core by ‘historic intuition,’ as it has been called, have failed. ... the great majority of traditions from the Prophet are documents not of the time to which they claim to belong, but of the successive stages of development of doctrines during the first centuries of Islam."

"Schacht also states "The Hanafis on the other hand hold the view that the paternity of the child and the character of the slave as umm al-walad in this case depends entirerly on an acknowledgement by the master.'"

"Margoliouth was a great linguist and scholar and was for a long time a professor of Arabic at the University of Oxford. He wanted his book neither to be an indictment nor an apology, and be did not fail in this endeavour. He was writing for a "tolerant" twentieth-century audience and he decided, even before he wrote his book, to observe towards the prophet "the respectful attitude which his greatness deserves"; and even though the facts he cites sometimes do not do credit to his conclusion, in this resolve too he succeeded. Margoliouth was also a minister, of the Church of England, but he wanted his book to be "absolutely free" from the Christian bias; here too one can safely say that his book shows no conscious Christian bias. If a bias has to be mentioned, it is a European's imperial bias which regards all non-European manners and institutions--in this particular case, Bedouin manners and institutions--as savage."