What the Koran Really Says: Language, Text, and Commentary Hardcover – October 1, 2002

This book is a massive collection of essays concerning the meaning of the Qur'an. Some essays are translated for the first time here into English: among them, those by Barth, Philonenko, and Geyer. The collection has value as a selection of Orientalist scholarship; it is also a snapshot into the professional trajectory of its editor, Ibn Warraq and its publisher, Prometheus.

The book was announced in 2002 and reviewed around the `web but I only caught a copy in January of 2003. It starts with two introductions. The first introduction, Ibn Warraq's own, is a sprawling overview of Arabic philology and Qur'anic scholarship. The second introduction is Toby Lester's Atlantic Monthly article... which you can get for free online.

So already we can see the problems with the book, and with its editor and publisher. It is published a year after the publisher promised it, and it is too long, and it contains material that can be found elsewhere, and it contains speculations that are extremely debatable within the field. A decade later, this author will put out "Which Koran?" which, as I've reviewed elsewhere, incorporates all these problems to an unforgiveable extent.

However, and this is what distinguishes this book from "Which Koran?": it also contains articles that cannot be found elsewhere (easily) and cannot be done without.

Part 2 concerns the archaeology of Islamic sloganeering - and it has just the one article, Yehuda Nevo's "Toward a Prehistory of Islam". This starts this book off with a nuclear bang. This article in 1991 forced scholarship to take a second look into the development of *popular* "Islam". Later in 2003, Prometheus put out Nevo's "Crossroads To Islam", which supercedes this article, but this article forms an effective "trailer" for the best part of that book.

Part 3 handles the language of the Qur'an - and is really multiple sub-parts. Here, too, there is external material you will need to make sense of the articles. The sub-text of the first sub-part is Arthur Jeffery's "Foreign Vocabulary". To that Mingana's article leads up, and then Margoliouth's article amends it. The sub-text of the next sub-part is the claim of Vollers that the Qur'an was not written in "irab" (noun-declensions). Kahle attempts to rescue Vollers and then Rabin disputes Kahle-Vollers (one problem here, though, is that this whole argument is likely moot as of now). Then come some speculative essays that add little to my understanding.

Part 4 started with some nice stuff about possible sources for the Qur'anic haggada: Essenic (Bishop, Philonenko) and Coptic (Bishai). Part 4 closed with a mini-part featuring Koebert's work on sura 22 and the "talbiya" pilgrimage-prayer. There we are, again, missing some context: in this case "Eine von 1 Kor. 15.27f beeinflusste talbia" in Biblica 35 (1954). Here, additionally, are some translation-decisions and outright typoes which drove me to my wit's end. Once I figured out what was going on, which literally took me years, I ended up agreeing with his reading of sura 22; but I remained unconvinced that 1 Cor. 15.27 can be located in Arabic ritual outside the tafsir / hadith tradition of the late Umayyad era (Qatada etc). For this: Manfred Kropp, "Tripartite formulas in the Qur'anic corpus" (2011), 259.

The whole of Part 5 is a waste of time. Mainly it demonstrates the lack of Orientalist agreement over The Verse of Jizya and the meaning of Furqan, alongside additional flights of scholarly fancy.

In part 6, J Barth explains the hiccups in the Qur'an, albeit in the order of revelation and not the canonical order. He is sometimes, I think, wrong but is awesome for sura 25. In part 8, Geyer lays out the strophic structure - the innate poetry - of suras 26, 51 among others (once more, it follows up someone else's work not reproduced here - this time it's DH Mueller's "Propheten", 1896, which handles 11, 44, 69 &c). In part 8 is also a Wellhausen miscellany, "Zum Koran", among which is a translation of a para-Qur'anic qasida by one "Samuel" and the start of a commentary. The rest of parts 6 and 8 is speculative - again. Well, there's part 7, which just rips off Bell's (discredited) commentaries; and there's an introduction by Ibn Rawandi to the work of Lueling (and Luxenburg), but I consider Lueling and Luxenburg to be fringe.

Finally, part 9 has the paleography of physical Qur'anic books. Grohmann lays out that they exist; Gerd-R Puin explains some of the controversy. I liked Gerd-R Puin's essay; I just wish he'd had more time with the manuscripts.

To sum up, a hefty portion of this thick book is redundant for honest researches into the Book of Allah. The redundant essays tend toward showing how little we know of the Qur'an - they are just illustrations of ignorance. Given that Ibn Warraq's argument at the outset was that these pericopae were unintelligible even when the Qur'an was compiled, and given that Ibn Warraq started out even before this book as an anti-Islamic essayist: I can't help but feel that the editor put in this backfill not for the reader's benefit, but for the activists'.

I don't know about you, but this annoys me, it makes me feel sucker-punched. I wanted a book about Islamic scholarship. In many places, this *is* a scholarly book. But that's not good enough for the activists; the activists want me to oppose Islam. I can do that, or not, just fine without the dubious help of dubious articles. There are enough GOOD articles out there for that purpose.

So I'm subtracting a star for the bloat and above all for the tendentiousness of that bloat. But I still have to give this book a four. It is a necessary work; and even more necessary if read alongside the other work of Arthur Jeffery and Yehuda Nevo.

The introduction is the best part of the book for the non-specialist. The rest is mostly older (and I mean older, many are 50-100 years old; nothing wrong with that, just pointing it out) academic articles by various orientalists about arcane topics like the best meaning of the term al-raheem. The overall point of the book is that the quran is much less clear in meaning and history than post 12th century orthodox opinion has decreed, but otherwise the pieces are not earth-shaking. Since the original sources quoted are all Islamic, its also clear that it was not all that crystal clear to Muslim scholars of the "golden age" either, but was decreed to be so at some later point and all discussion was then stopped. Well, its open now, what with Satan (or Al Gore) having invented the internet..

What the Koran Really Says is a somewhat misleading title for Ibn Warraq's book since the subject is not Islamic theology or Koranic exegesis. What this book is instead, is an anthology of articles dealing with various aspects of the Koran's origins, history, linguistics, and textual criticism. For a number of reasons, the Koran has not been subjected to textual and literary criticism nearly as much as the Bible and the papers reprinted in What the Koran Really Says help to fill that lack somewhat.

There are political and cultural reasons that the Koran has not been as thoroughly analyzed as the Bible, but one of the main reasons has to be the simple fact that the history and language of the Koran is far more opaque that the Bible's. The text of the Koran is often very hard to understand, even by native speakers of Arabic and the way the texts jumps from subject to subject within every sura and even within paragraphs suggests a haphazard and complicated history of composition and editing.

The Greek New Testament was written in the context of a highly literate culture with a historical and cultural background fairly well known to the historian. We know more about the events of the first century AD than about almost any other period in the ancient world. The Hebrew Old Testament is older and the circumstances of its composition are somewhat more obscure, but Palestine or Israel is on the cross road between Asia and Africa and we can gain a fairly accurate idea of the history of the region from the records left by the Egyptians and the various Mesopotamian states, not to mention from the Israelites themselves.

The Koran, on the other hand, was created by a semi-literate people who lived on the fringes of the major civilizations of the time. We have few records of the Arabian Peninsula during the time of Mohammed and for the first century of the Islamic era, beyond traditional Muslim accounts that are difficult to verify. It is possible that almost everything that is said about the composition of the Koran, including the time and place it was revealed, is untrue and in fact, we cannot be certain that Mohammed actually existed or if he did the deeds attributed to him. The language of the Koran is Arabic, but again, many words in the text seem to have been derived from other Semitic languages, and it is not always whether the dialect is that of the Bedouins of central Arabia, as tradition states, or perhaps the language is closer to that of Northern Arabia, where the speakers might be more influenced by Syriac or Aramaic.

The articles presented in What the Koran Really Says deal with these questions and more. They are all very well done and thorough, however they are also intended for an audience of scholars and, as a layman, I sometimes had trouble following them. I think someone more knowledgeable of Arabic grammar and the text of the Koran would get more out of this book than I would. As it is, my attention wandered while reading about the fine points of grammatical constructions or the precise meaning of a sentence. The best and most interesting portions of this book were the introductions written by Ibn Warraq himself and I think he would have done a better service to his readers by writing a book which summarized and explained the arguments found in the various articles.

Still, I cannot complain if the book is not for me. I am certain that any scholar who wishes to study the origins and development of the Koran will find What the Koran Really Says to be a valuable resource.

Its nice to know from people who are fluent in Arabic what this book, the Koran, really says. But I will always have problems with the quote from it; "It pleases Allah to kill the infidel." and "All of the infidels are the jews and christians." which means, all the infirdels are everybody but me!

Excellent English translation of the Koran with explanations for many of the customs, cultural references and nuances of the Koran - including the politically incorrect but accurate explanations of many sections.