In a nut shell, as we all now know, the exact origin for the material in the Qur'an is not known nor is it known exactly who or when it was collected and canonized. What is know is much of it is nonsensical. To make sense of the gibberish, one scholar has begun back tracking and going back to the type of "Arabic" that was used during initial stages of the development of what is now the Qur'an and he has found that many of the most obscure passages can be better understood by using the dominate ME language of the day - Syro-Aramaic.
The Syro-Aramaic Reading of the Koran
Synopsis
This book takes a philological and text-critical approach to the study of the Qur'an and is considered a major, but controversial work in the field of Qur'anic philology.
The work advances the thesis that the content of critical sections of the Qu'ran has been broadly misread by succeeding generations of readers through a faulty and exclusive reliance on the assumption that classical Arabic formed the foundation of the Qu'ran whereas linguistic analysis of the text suggests that the prevalent Syro-Aramic language up to the 7th century formed a stronger etymological basis for its meaning.
Luxenberg, like many scholars before him, remarks that the Qur'an contains much ambiguous and even inexplicable language. He asserts that even Muslim scholars find some passages difficult to parse and have written reams of Quranic commentary attempting to explain these passages. However, the assumption behind their endeavours has always been that any difficult passage is true, meaningful, and pure Arabic, and that it can be deciphered with the tools of traditional Muslim scholarship. Luxenberg accuses Western academic scholars of the Qur'an of taking a timid and imitative approach, relying too heavily on the biased work of Muslim scholars.
The Syro-Aramaic Reading of the Koran
Synopsis
This book takes a philological and text-critical approach to the study of the Qur'an and is considered a major, but controversial work in the field of Qur'anic philology.
The work advances the thesis that the content of critical sections of the Qu'ran has been broadly misread by succeeding generations of readers through a faulty and exclusive reliance on the assumption that classical Arabic formed the foundation of the Qu'ran whereas linguistic analysis of the text suggests that the prevalent Syro-Aramic language up to the 7th century formed a stronger etymological basis for its meaning.
Luxenberg, like many scholars before him, remarks that the Qur'an contains much ambiguous and even inexplicable language. He asserts that even Muslim scholars find some passages difficult to parse and have written reams of Quranic commentary attempting to explain these passages. However, the assumption behind their endeavours has always been that any difficult passage is true, meaningful, and pure Arabic, and that it can be deciphered with the tools of traditional Muslim scholarship. Luxenberg accuses Western academic scholars of the Qur'an of taking a timid and imitative approach, relying too heavily on the biased work of Muslim scholars.
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