Ep.11: Lüling's examples destroy a preserved Qur'an!

Dr Günter Lüling's 1970's Doctoral Thesis on finding Christian hymns incorporated throughout the Qur'an has been a breakthrough research, Yet, it cost him his career as he was forced out of academia by Dr Spitaler, and into obscurity, until we got it translated into English, so that the whole world could see and read it for themselves. According to Fred Donner, Lüling's basic argument in his thesis is that, "the Qur’ān text, as we have it today, represents a reworking by Muḥammad of earlier Christian texts that had served as liturgy in a hitherto unknown pre-Islamic Christian community in Mecca...Hellenistic Christianity, including the Christian community of Mecca, saw Jesus as divine; but Muḥammad, in Lüling’s view, clung to the older Arabian “religion of Abraham” and its concepts." Lüling' believed, according to Donner that, "Muḥammad, in his clash with the Meccan Christians, took strophic hymns that had been used in the Christian liturgy and emended them, changing individual words and phrases in order to bring their theology in line with his own views, particularly the idea of Jesus not as God, but as a divine messenger (rasūl) in accord with the notion of his status as an angel. Lüling attempted to recover the earlier Christian teachings of these buried Christian hymns by making relatively minor adjustments to the received Qurʾan text—in effect, reversing the very emendations to these texts that, in Lüling’s view, Muḥammad himself had made." (Fred M. Donner, Al-ʿUṣūr al-Wusṭā 25, pgs.231-232, 2017) Lüling noted 4 different periods of Qur'anic evolution: 1) 'Erstwhile Christian Tests': Because they were historically the oldest, these texts derived from pre-Islamic Christian strophic hymnody hidden in the ground layer [rasm without diacritical points and without strokes to indicate the vowels) covered up by a new opinionated Islamic reinterpretation pressed on the ambiguous rasm/ground layer. 2) 'Second Sense Qur'anic Texts': These layers of texts were a wilful new Islamic interpretation pressed on the ground layer of the erstwhile Christian strophic texts. They constitute the historically oldest one third of the transmitted Qur'anic text. 3) 'Single Sense Qur'anic Texts': These were pure Islamic texts, in that the the ground layer (rasm) had been written directly and solely for the expression of the revelations to the Prophet Muhammad. 4) 'Post-Muhammadan Qur'an Editors': These were reinterpretations of the earlier texts, in such a way that the originally intended ideas of Muhammad got totally lost, leaving a "horrible, almost incomprehensibly distorted text as a result" (Lüling, pg. 11) According to Donner, "Lüling’s hypotheses represented a bold challenge to the traditional view of the Qur’ān and its environment held not only by Muslims, but also by Western scholars at the time, for which reason it was received with great hostility by most of the academic establishment in Germany." What's more, Lüling’s intellectual prowess was beyond the grasp of most German scholars at that time. As Donner continues, "Lüling’s impressive erudition in Old Testament and New Testament theology, Islamic studies, and Arabic studies, combined with his keen intellect, meant that his hypotheses were often intriguing but difficult to evaluate confidently, as few people have similarly wide-ranging training in all these areas; reading his work, one often feels that one is “over one’s head” in unfamiliar technical material." "The revolutionary nature of Lüling’s hypotheses on the Qur’ān and Islam’s origins", as Donner continues, "led fairly quickly to his being forced out of the German academic establishment, even though his dissertation had originally been supported enthusiastically by his Doktorvater and was accepted by his department with the mark of eximium opus, “extraordinary work.” Lüling’s ideas were just too threatening to certain established scholars whose work would have been overturned by it." "His effort to submit a Habilitationsschrift or “second dissertation,” necessary to qualify for a permanent teaching position in Germany, was thwarted; a number of senior Orientalists, led apparently by the influential Prof. Anton Spitaler of Munich, blocked his efforts to find a position, and organized a virtual conspiracy of silence against him so that his work was hardly reviewed in Germany—and, since it was written in German, few foreign scholars were able readily to follow Lüling’s complex argumentation or bothered to do so." (Fred M. Donner, Al-ʿUṣūr al-Wusṭā 25, pg.232, 2017) That was until we took his English translation and had it reworked into a more readable translation, which was initially published by the Motilal Banarsidass Publishing House in Delhi in 2003, and now, due to its popularity, newly republished in 2022, allowing many 100s to now read and enjoy his conclusions. © Pfander Centre for Apologetics - US, 2022 (68,470) Music: "Feeling the Caribbean Sun" by Horst Hoffman, from filmmusic-io