A Convert’s Complaint: Analyzing Naipaul’s Views on Islam

Harimau to Pankaj#130

````Do you think you are making any sense at all?````

Do you think YOU are making any sense at all, harimau?

rsridar, the comments by Rdesikan on your use of (pbuh) made me go back and read your post. I was humbled. Your usage of (pbuh) - knowing you are a Hindu - showed a consideration and respect that others could do well to adopt (on both sides of the border). Of such small things are mighty bridges built.

Rehan Ansari, that was a very interesting post regarding the `Avatar`. Many thanks! I have to confess, I don`t have an understanding of the idea of an `Avatar` - rsridhar, could you elaborate?

New York Times article on origins of Islam...

this dude`s surely gonna get a fatwa

http://www.nytimes.com/2002/03/02/arts/02ISLA.html

Christoph Luxenberg, a scholar of ancient Semitic languages in Germany, argues that the Koran has been misread and mistranslated for centuries. His work, based on the earliest copies of the Koran, maintains that parts of Islam`s holy book are derived from pre-existing Christian Aramaic texts that were misinterpreted by later Islamic scholars who prepared the editions of the Koran commonly read today.

So, for example, the virgins who are supposedly awaiting good Islamic martyrs as their reward in paradise are in reality ``white raisins`` of crystal clarity rather than fair maidens.

-----

The reverberations have affected non-Muslim scholars in Western countries. ``Between fear and political correctness, it`s not possible to say anything other than sugary nonsense about Islam,`` said one scholar at an American university who asked not to be named, referring to the threatened violence as well as the widespread reluctance on United States college campuses to criticize other cultures.

------

Arrest VHP leaders, says Shankaracharya

Amitabh Shukla

(New Delhi, March 1) Jagadguru Shankaracharya of the Goverdhan Peeth on Friday demanded the arrest of top leaders of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) to check the communal virus from spreading in the country.

``If organisations like the SIMI can be banned for indulging in anti-national activities then why not the VHP, which too is indulging in similar acts,`` the Shankaracharya said.

Swami Sri Adhokshjanand Dev Teerath Ji Maharaj said that these elements are presenting a ``distorted face`` of Hinduism to the world and the developments in Gujarat would be a setback in the fight against terrorism.

The Shankaracharya who was recently in Kashmir to talk to various militant groups, said fundamentalists have been given a long rope by the government itself. ``The greatest patron of the likes of the VHP is the government itself,`` he said, adding, ``it is legitimising the activities of the militant Hindu organisations`` by taking a soft stand on them.

On the Ayodhya dispute, the Shankaracharya said that it was a bilateral issue between the two communities. ``We have already begun the process of a dialogue,`` he claimed.

Demanding the arrest of VHP leaders Ashok Singhal and Giriraj Kishore, he said it was time the government acted tough. ``Concrete action would go a long way in calming passions” he said.

NY Times

March 2, 2002



Radical New Views of Islam and the Origins of the Koran

By ALEXANDER STILLE

o Muslims the Koran is the very word of God, who spoke through the Angel Gabriel to Muhammad: ``This book is not to be doubted,`` the Koran declares unequivocally at its beginning. Scholars and writers in Islamic countries who have ignored that warning have sometimes found themselves the target of death threats and violence, sending a chill through universities around the world.

Yet despite the fear, a handful of experts have been quietly investigating the origins of the Koran, offering radically new theories about the text`s meaning and the rise of Islam.

Christoph Luxenberg, a scholar of ancient Semitic languages in Germany, argues that the Koran has been misread and mistranslated for centuries. His work, based on the earliest copies of the Koran, maintains that parts of Islam`s holy book are derived from pre-existing Christian Aramaic texts that were misinterpreted by later Islamic scholars who prepared the editions of the Koran commonly read today.

So, for example, the virgins who are supposedly awaiting good Islamic martyrs as their reward in paradise are in reality ``white raisins`` of crystal clarity rather than fair maidens.

Christoph Luxenberg, however, is a pseudonym, and his scholarly tome ````The Syro-Aramaic Reading of the Koran`` had trouble finding a publisher, although it is considered a major new work by several leading scholars in the field. Verlag Das Arabische Buch in Berlin ultimately published the book.



The caution is not surprising. Salman Rushdie`s ``Satanic Verses`` received a fatwa because it appeared to mock Muhammad. The Egyptian novelist Naguib Mahfouz was stabbed because one of his books was thought to be irreligious. And when the Arab scholar Suliman Bashear argued that Islam developed as a religion gradually rather than emerging fully formed from the mouth of the Prophet, he was injured after being thrown from a second- story window by his students at the University of Nablus in the West Bank. Even many broad-minded liberal Muslims become upset when the historical voracity and authenticity of the Koran is questioned.

The reverberations have affected non-Muslim scholars in Western countries. ``Between fear and political correctness, it`s not possible to say anything other than sugary nonsense about Islam,`` said one scholar at an American university who asked not to be named, referring to the threatened violence as well as the widespread reluctance on United States college campuses to criticize other cultures.

While scriptural interpretation may seem like a remote and innocuous activity, close textual study of Jewish and Christian scripture played no small role in loosening the Church`s domination on the intellectual and cultural life of Europe, and paving the way for unfettered secular thought. ``The Muslims have the benefit of hindsight of the European experience, and they know very well that once you start questioning the holy scriptures, you don`t know where it will stop,`` the scholar explained.

The touchiness about questioning the Koran predates the latest rise of Islamic militancy. As long ago as 1977, John Wansbrough of the School of Oriental and African Studies in London wrote that subjecting the Koran to ``analysis by the instruments and techniques of biblical criticism is virtually unknown.``

Mr. Wansbrough insisted that the text of the Koran appeared to be a composite of different voices or texts compiled over dozens if not hundreds of years. After all, scholars agree that there is no evidence of the Koran until 691 — 59 years after Muhammad`s death — when the Dome of the Rock mosque in Jerusalem was built, carrying several Koranic inscriptions.

These inscriptions differ to some degree from the version of the Koran that has been handed down through the centuries, suggesting, scholars say, that the Koran may have still been evolving in the last decade of the seventh century. Moreover, much of what we know as Islam — the lives and sayings of the Prophet — is based on texts from between 130 and 300 years after Muhammad`s death.

In 1977 two other scholars from the School for Oriental and African Studies at London University — Patricia Crone (a professor of history at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton) and Michael Cook (a professor of Near Eastern history at Princeton University) — suggested a radically new approach in their book ``Hagarism: The Making of the Islamic World.``

Since there are no Arabic chronicles from the first century of Islam, the two looked at several non-Muslim, seventh-century accounts that suggested Muhammad was perceived not as the founder of a new religion but as a preacher in the Old Testament tradition, hailing the coming of a Messiah. Many of the early documents refer to the followers of Muhammad as ``hagarenes,`` and the ``tribe of Ishmael,`` in other words as descendants of Hagar, the servant girl that the Jewish patriarch Abraham used to father his son Ishmael.

In its earliest form, Ms. Crone and Mr. Cook argued, the followers of Muhammad may have seen themselves as retaking their place in the Holy Land alongside their Jewish cousins. (And many Jews appear to have welcomed the Arabs as liberators when they entered Jerusalem in 638.)

The idea that Jewish messianism animated the early followers of the Prophet is not widely accepted in the field, but ``Hagarism`` is credited with opening up the field. ``Crone and Cook came up with some very interesting revisionist ideas,`` says Fred M. Donner of the University of Chicago and author of the recent book ``Narratives of Islamic Origins: The Beginnings of Islamic Historical Writing.`` ``I think in trying to reconstruct what happened, they went off the deep end, but they were asking the right questions.``

The revisionist school of early Islam has quietly picked up momentum in the last few years as historians began to apply rational standards of proof to this material.

Mr. Cook and Ms. Crone have revised some of their early hypotheses while sticking to others. ``We were certainly wrong about quite a lot of things,`` Ms. Crone said. ``But I stick to the basic point we made: that Islamic history did not arise as the classic tradition says it does.``

Ms. Crone insists that the Koran and the Islamic tradition present a fundamental paradox. The Koran is a text soaked in monotheistic thinking, filled with stories and references to Abraham, Isaac, Joseph and Jesus, and yet the official history insists that Muhammad, an illiterate camel merchant, received the revelation in Mecca, a remote, sparsely populated part of Arabia, far from the centers of monotheistic thought, in an environment of idol-worshiping Arab Bedouins. Unless one accepts the idea of the angel Gabriel, Ms. Crone says, historians must somehow explain how all these monotheistic stories and ideas found their way into the Koran.

``There are only two possibilities,`` Ms. Crone said. ``Either there had to be substantial numbers of Jews and Christians in Mecca or the Koran had to have been composed somewhere else.``

Indeed, many scholars who are not revisionists agree that Islam must be placed back into the wider historical context of the religions of the Middle East rather than seeing it as the spontaneous product of the pristine Arabian desert. ``I think there is increasing acceptance, even on the part of many Muslims, that Islam emerged out of the wider monotheistic soup of the Middle East,`` says Roy Mottahedeh, a professor of Islamic history at Harvard University.

Scholars like Mr. Luxenberg and Gerd- R. Puin, who teaches at Saarland University in Germany, have returned to the earliest known copies of the Koran in order to grasp what it says about the document`s origins and composition. Mr. Luxenberg explains these copies are written without vowels and diacritical dots that modern Arabic uses to make it clear what letter is intended. In the eighth and ninth centuries, more than a century after the death of Muhammad, Islamic commentators added diacritical marks to clear up the ambiguities of the text, giving precise meanings to passages based on what they considered to be their proper context. Mr. Luxenberg`s radical theory is that many of the text`s difficulties can be clarified when it is seen as closely related to Aramaic, the language group of most Middle Eastern Jews and Christians at the time.

For example, the famous passage about the virgins is based on the word hur, which is an adjective in the feminine plural meaning simply ``white.`` Islamic tradition insists the term hur stands for ``houri,`` which means virgin, but Mr. Luxenberg insists that this is a forced misreading of the text. In both ancient Aramaic and in at least one respected dictionary of early Arabic, hur means ``white raisin.``

Mr. Luxenberg has traced the passages dealing with paradise to a Christian text called Hymns of Paradise by a fourth-century author. Mr. Luxenberg said the word paradise was derived from the Aramaic word for garden and all the descriptions of paradise described it as a garden of flowing waters, abundant fruits and white raisins, a prized delicacy in the ancient Near East. In this context, white raisins, mentioned often as hur, Mr. Luxenberg said, makes more sense than a reward of sexual favors.

In many cases, the differences can be quite significant. Mr. Puin points out that in the early archaic copies of the Koran, it is impossible to distinguish between the words ``to fight`` and ``to kill.`` In many cases, he said, Islamic exegetes added diacritical marks that yielded the harsher meaning, perhaps reflecting a period in which the Islamic Empire was often at war.

A return to the earliest Koran, Mr. Puin and others suggest, might lead to a more tolerant brand of Islam, as well as one that is more conscious of its close ties to both Judaism and Christianity.

``It is serious and exciting work,`` Ms. Crone said of Mr. Luxenberg`s work. Jane McAuliffe, a professor of Islamic studies at Georgetown University, has asked Mr. Luxenberg to contribute an essay to the Encyclopedia of the Koran, which she is editing.

Mr. Puin would love to see a ``critical edition`` of the Koran produced, one based on recent philological work, but, he says, ``the word critical is misunderstood in the Islamic world — it is seen as criticizing or attacking the text.``

Some Muslim authors have begun to publish skeptical, revisionist work on the Koran as well. Several new volumes of revisionist scholarship, ``The Origins of the Koran,`` and ``The Quest for the Historical Muhammad,`` have been edited by a former Muslim who writes under the pen name Ibn Warraq. Mr. Warraq, who heads a group called the Institute for the Secularization of Islamic Society, makes no bones about having a political agenda. ``Biblical scholarship has made people less dogmatic, more open,`` he said, ``and I hope that happens to Muslim society as well.``

But many Muslims find the tone and claims of revisionism offensive. ``I think the broader implications of some of the revisionist scholarship is to say that the Koran is not an authentic book, that it was fabricated 150 years later,`` says Ebrahim Moosa, a professor of religious studies at Duke University, as well as a Muslim cleric whose liberal theological leanings earned him the animosity of fundamentalists in South Africa, which he left after his house was firebombed.

Andrew Rippin, an Islamicist at the University of Victoria in British Columbia, Canada, says that freedom of speech in the Islamic world is more likely to evolve from within the Islamic interpretative tradition than from outside attacks on it. Approaches to the Koran that are now branded as heretical — interpreting the text metaphorically rather than literally — were widely practiced in mainstream Islam a thousand years ago.

``When I teach the history of the interpretation it is eye-opening to students the amount of independent thought and diversity of interpretation that existed in the early centuries of Islam,`` Mr. Rippin says. ``It was only in more recent centuries that there was a need for limiting interpretation.``

re: anNy

{{yeah im a shia..a very qattar one at that also..i think this idea of sending emails to the gov of india and iran, if you are not bulling, is possibly the stupidest idea ever, with all due respect...who the hell are they to help and just who the hell are you to ask them for help huh?}}

....on that note, who the hell are you (a pakistani) to shove jihadis into india to `help` kashmiris?...and who the hell are you to moan , cry, and shove your nonsense down kashmiris` throats till they have no choice but to accept your militants or be killed by them?....

re: raw-ulcers

{{What happened to Muslims is not good. But they did the same thing to nonMuslims - Hindus, Christians, Sikhs, Parsees, Budhists and Jains. Killings by Muslims used to be everyday affair from time of Jehangir to Aurangzeb. AND MUCH OF IT SANCTIONED BY THE RULER OF THE DAY. Think about it too.}}

...we don`t have to descend to the barbarism that characterizes islam`s past and in many places its present state...what did the rats such as the moghuls ultimately get? nothing...they had their behinds kicked out of most places and their `glory` period is gone, never to return again...(islamic fundamentalism exists because they are bitter about lost power, and the rule of the sword no longer works...)

...having said that, violence and destruction of property hurts the whole country...no one in india benefits from it; every citizen, majority or minority, pays a price...not a sensible way to fix anything...

sameer: Muhammed borrowed tons of stories from the jews before he killed them. His night journey screams zoroastianism. Hinduism is almost a direct decendent of the ancient egyptian religion as is xtianity (a retelling of osirus/isis/mithra etc). Islam is almost a completely pre-Islamic religion. Salat, fasting, hajj are egyptian, the kaba, the God El and Allat also predate Allah. Whats new?

As redisikan said some say akenatin was really Moses. Theres zero evidence of the exodus being historical (HIS story). However, the flip side is that the bible has some remarkable archaelogical accuracies (im only showing this side cuz no one else is). Im not sure which ethiopian church ur refering to but I thought it was the ark of the covenant not noahs ark. There`s also some evidence that ethiopia was linked to india, that abraham was brahma (or egyptian) and a bunch of other irrelevent sh1t. None of this matters though cuz people are sheep and need quotes to tell em what to do... (What if gabriel asked muhammed to think instead of read?)

``What happened to Muslims is not good. But they did the same thing to nonMuslims - Hindus, Christians, Sikhs, Parsees, Budhists and Jains. Killings by Muslims used to be everyday affair from time of Jehangir to Aurangzeb. ``

..... and i thought the mohammadens were the only people who were obsessed with ancient feuds and the dietary habits of a long-dead prophet and his merry men ...... i thought that the clueless ummah had cornered the market on stupidity as they continue to live with gabriel and other ghosts and jinns from the past ........

.... it is extremely heartening to see that the wild-eyed followers of the half-naked faqir, who pollute the wrong side of the border, also suffer from the same horrible disease .....it must be in the genes....it doesn`t make any difference whether the last name is abbasi or krishnaswamy - we are all damned ......

..... i am sure the response from the other side is going to be the same : ``But there is no way I am willing to forget or ignore or turn a blind eye to past events of history. Let it be. I DON`T ----ing care.``

......... thank god i am a white southern baptist - at least we lynch black folks one at a time, instead of burning them en masse ......

harimau #129
One way to feel `better` is to do something. You can write to the PM`s office for whatever its worth:
http://pmindia.nic.in/writetous.htm

harimau #129
That was your most obscene post to date. Tell you what, you hypocrite post your home address on the web so that those people who want can go and mete frontier justice on you. Then disconnect your phone so that your family members (how many children do you have?) cannot call 911 and then watch them all be burnt to death. Ready to face these `realities`?

re: aicha

{{hmmm maybe because you frequent mosques more tahn your Muslim friend does temples??!! But pls ask the person what his pbm was instead of insinuating/generalizing/holding grudges. He probably just had a crummy day !! }}

...isn`t going to other places of worship - temples, churches, synagogues - acknowledging other gods?...which, in Islam, as we all know, is punishable by death...

...and how can this fellow`s friend be having a crummy day on exactly those days when there`s some hindu festival...

Self flagellating Indians,

No minority can be safe if the police show bias. Law must be enforced. Guilty must be punished.

After that Indians have to ask how a mob of 2000 armed men gathered and attacked a train in 45 minutes burning to death innocent children.

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow.asp?art_ID=2400828

Mayhem at Aurangzeb`s birthplace

BHARAT DESAI

TIMES NEWS NETWORK [ FRIDAY, MARCH 01, 2002 12:11:57 AM ]

AHMEDABAD: Besides being the birthplace of the zealot Mughal emperor Aurangzeb, the twin towns of Dahod and Godhra have always been known for the religious divide that runs deep between communities and even within them.

And had the police taken serious note of a clash between groups of Muslims in Dahod`s neighbouring town in December 2001, perhaps it would not have been caught totally unawares by Wednesday`s macabre attack on the Sabarmati Express.

While Godhra has always been a flash-point of clashes between Hindus and Muslims, it is also witnessing an intensive struggle for supremacy between radical and moderate sections of the Muslim community. In early December, followers of the moderate Ahil-e-Sunnat, an offspring of the Barelvi Islamic School, clashed with members of the radical Tableeq Jamaat after their differences over Islamic tenets came to a boil.

The rioting led to a lot of violence in which some shops and vehicles belonging to both the groups were torched. A dozen persons from both the sides were injured as the groups clashed with lathis and swords and pelted stones on each other for almost two hours before the police burst tear-gas shells to disperse the mob.

The police arrested 72 persons from both the groups after they registered complaints of loot and plunder against each other. The incident followed a month after the local police warned a group of Muslim boys belonging to Tableeq Jamaat against dressing themselves like Osama Bin Laden.

The problem started when two Tableeq Jamaat preachers from Kashmir landed up at the Noor mosque of the Sunnat and started collecting donations during the month of Ramzaan. The actual clash began when the duo insisted that they would sleep at the mosque against the instructions of the Sunnat.

In its seven mosques in Dahod, a town of 1.20 lakh population, the Sunnat has put up boards saying: ``Outsiders shouldn`t come to the mosque. Delivering provocative speeches is strictly prohibited.``

The Sunnat was forced to put up the instruction after it found that the Tableeq preachers from outside Dahod were coming to the Sunnat mosques and delivering provocative speeches based on radical interpretation of Islam and trying to hijack the Sunnat followers to the Tableeq fold.

The Barelvi school, from which the Sunnat has sprung, has always stood for dargah worship and Urs celebrations (fetes in memory of Sufi saints), thus believing in the spiritualism of Muslim saints. While the Tableeqis, who are for puritanical Salafi brand of Islam, equate dargah worship with idol worship.

Sunnat leaders, some of whom are familiar faces during Hindu religious festivals in Dahod, say the Tableeqis spread hatred in the society through their ideology. Osama bin Laden is a hero for them.

In mid-2001, Tableeqis disturbed a Moharram procession. The stand-off between the two groups began in 1981 when the Tableeqis objected to the Sunnat maulvi reading the annual Id namaaz at the local Idgah. But the Sunnat spurned the Tableeqis. As a result, the local collector stepped in and took control of the Idgah. Since that day the Idgah is locked, a tribute to the rivalry between the two groups.

Interestingly, the two outside Tableeqi activists, who, according to the Sunnat, were Kashmiris, fled the town as soon as trouble began in December. Police now believe that they were probably ISI agents and there could be more of them still around.

The attack on Sabarmati Express, it is now learnt, originated from a rumour in Dahod that the passengers had attacked a mosque. By the time the train reached Godhra, 40 minutes away, the mob was ready to pounce on the train.

Needless to say, there is a very large section of the minority community in Godhra and other parts of Gujarat who would be as upset with the attack on the train as the VHP volunteers.

RSridhar # 113 and Reply # 64

Interesting observation about Mohammad`s diet.

People eat what is available locally. Like a Tibetan does not eat DATES just as Mohammad did not eat SHRIMP. So stop oversimplifying what Mohammad did or did not do.

Medically speaking he probably was extremely constipated and needed high fibre diet which dates obviously have. Soil of Madina and Mecca is not good enough to grow cereals rich in fibre. So dates are fine. It also prooves that he was not diabetic.

Olives are good for hyperlipidemia - means high cholestrol. May be he had that problem. Being GOD, Mohammad probably knew it all, including medicine.

Ref Pankaj #: 120

[Whatever is happening is very shameful for all Indians.]

Is that right?

[What type of rule do we want, mob rule or constitutional rule. There are some very distressing signals for the Indian poility in these riots. A section of people(Muslims as well as Hindus) seems to have lost faith in the Indian judicial system. When a Muslim mob of 2000 torched the train and burned the victims alive, the right approach would have been to bring all the culprits to justice.]

Is the area fenced in so that all the perpetrators of the original crime could be arrested by the police? How many policemen will be needed to arrest them all, even if they were penned in? Does Godhra have that many policemen to begin with? How do you identify the perpetrators, let us say, a couple of hours later after they have dispersed? Do you think you are making any sense at all?

Even if India spent $ 1 billion now to import TV cameras and mount them on poles in every major city to identify rioters in the future, how many cities do you think you can cover? What is the guarantee that the TV cameras will not be stolen or damaged during the riots?

Hello? Anybody home?

Please continue wringing your hands.

Ref sadna #: 122

[As chief of the Gujarat BJP, Modi can send out directives to maintain peace if he wanted. So if these riots are embarassing the NDA government, why isn`t ABV coming down strongly on him, his administration and his party unit?]

Do you have any clue how many cities, towns and villages there are in Gujarat? What is the Chief Minister to do? Declare martial law and call for troops as soon as the Godhra outrage? How long before the troops arrive? How about the period before the troops arrive? How many police do you think you will need to hold down the millions of Gujaratis?

[And where are Mulayam Singh Yadav and Chandrababu Naidu and where are the Muslim leaders pointing this out? Wheres the outrage? At least from what appears in the press, its seems all have been struck with paralysis.]

I will tell you why there is no outrage. Everybody realizes that if frontier justice is not meted out to the section of population that started this gory business, all of India will go up in flames. If martial law had been declared and troops rushed to Ahmedabad within hours, do you think Surat and Baroda and any number of other cities in Gujarat would have been quiet? Now at least people will say that the Islamic thugs were paid back in full and there will be no riots in Allahabad, Lucknow, Hyderabad, Delhi or Bhopal. You have to understand mob mentality and let the steam blow.

I know I sound harsh but that is the reality in India. The idiots who started it should have known that they are going to be at the losing end.

But, as I figured, here you are wringing your hands and tripping over yourself trying to apologize. No need to apologize, I say. Fcuk them all, on both sides!