I am reverting back to Islam
Reply #34 - August 28, 2014, 02:18 PM
There's no question that SOME of the Qur'an is beautiful, almost entirely Meccan surahs, as I mentioned above. While some is a mess or very dull and prosaic. The translation of "My Ordeal With the Qur'an" gives a good discussion of how this works.
The problem with Neuwirth and her 'traditionalist' school is that they can't bring themselves to be critical of any part of the Qur'an. Everything is excused, and the wildly varying levels of style are explained away with unbelievable gyrations. They are too focused on building bridges and showing respect, something that cannot serve as the basis for a *critical* analysis of the Qur'an.
Here's some quotes from that Markus Gross essay ("New Ways of Qur'anic Research," where he criticizes how absurd this position is on its face. This is talking about Neuwirth's analysis and how incompatible it is with her own conclusions about Qur'anic style and composition:
"Another one of her findings is very interesting and worth mentioning. While early Meccan surahs display a variety of up to 80 different types of rhyme, in what she considers to be the third phase only 8 types remain! If we add the fact that in 29 (!) surahs a word as central as Allah is not found (instead: rabb -- Lord), that many verses in Medinan surahs if compared to their Meccan counterparts are super-long, and that the contents of different surahs drastically contradict each other (e.g. concerning the consumption of wine), then it is well astounding that scholars like Angelika Neuwirth, who were educated to the European Academic tradition, do not jump to the most natural logical conclusion that every scholar of Ancient Greek or Latin would jump to: namely that the Qur'an is composed of different texts, written by different people with different views, probably over a prolonged period of time!"
"Concerning the alleged beauty of the Qur'an, Angelika Neuwirth emphasizes the even proportions in the sequence o0f "Gesatze" (strophes). All the things that normally disturb a Western reader of the Qur'an, the breaks in the arguments, the unfinished sentences and thoughts, the mind-numbing repetition of typical phrases -- for her these are intentional caesure, and more than that, well-chosen breaks."
This is characteristic of starting with the belief that the Qur'an is inimitable and beautiful. Bugs are described as features. Even the Qur'an's various errors in Arabic grammar are excused as 'rhetorical devices,' much as in English we might say "I saw thems their" as a beautiful rhetorical device. Except we don't.
Any honest appraisal of the Qur'an's aesthetic value would resemble Noldeke's.
Gross's very long essay is an extensive analysis of genuine oral literature (like the Vedas, the Homeric hymns, contemporary African oral literature), its characteristic forms and features, its linguistic structures, and its aesthetics. Then he shows how the Qur'an fails to follow any of these ... its language is too monotonous, its form is too gelatinous and lacking in rhythmic device and variation, its narration is too disjointed and chaotic. The few strophic structures buried in some of the surahs that resemble oral literature, moreover, have been obliterated in the current compilation. What you are left with is partially mutilated strophic poetry and partially poetified bland prose; an attempt at leveling and uniformity has been imposed on radically different texts, awkwardly deleting strophic structure in some places and awkwardly imposing vague and loose rhyme upon prose in others. Beauty remains in the text after that process, but primarily in the form of Meccan surahs that have not been overly mutilated.
Btw, as to the Qur'an's compilation, the fundamental point that must be recognized is that Muslim tradition is, in large part, an attempt to explain the baffling, disjointed, and radically disparate nature of the Qur'an. It is impossible to look at it and not see that it is a composite text assembled over a long period of time. Muslims saw this too, as would anybody. But what Muslims did, because they were confronted with such a problematic text, is formulated a backstory of its composition in which all these peculiarities were given a theological and biographical explanation. Thus the *radically different* types of surahs were characterized as "Meccan" and "Medinan" and located at long distances within the life of a prophet. The doctrine of abrogration was introduced, and of successive revelation. The doctrine of an unbroken chain of oral recitation was introduced. In this way, the traditional biography of Mohammed was created to encompass and explain the chaos of the Qur'an itself. Because the Qur'an's orthographic chaos and the existence of variant texts and readings also called out for explanation, Muslim tradition itself then records that the codices were fixed by Uthman, decades after Mohammed's death, with a recension, and then (contradictorily) modified in some ways by Abd al Malik.
In other words, the Qur'an is of course a deeply composite text that was composed over many decades. That is not in legitimate question; what is in question is the *historical explanation* for this state of the text. To explain this as the product of a single prophet, Muslim tradition argues, for theological reasons, that (a) the composition of the text was secondary to an oral tradition of recitation (unattested by any historical evidence); and (b) the disjointedness, radically different text types, and contradictions reflects the prophet's biography and a series of radical dislocations in his own life and circumstances, as he delivered the Qur'an over a period of 20 years.
That Muslims might accept this teetering theological construct to reconcile the state of the Qur'an with its putative origin from a single prophet is understandable, that Western scholars like Neuwirth might follow them out of a misguided effort to build bridges and avoid causing offense ... is inexcusable. Qur'anic studies has long been the last bastion of uncritical Western theology. Only recently, over the last decade or so, has the type of critical attitude that became the norm in other religious studies in the mid 19th century started to become a major factor in the field.
Topic: I am reverting back to Islam