The Koran from a Vernacular Perspective: Vocabulary Strings and Composition Strata.

• Author: Rippin, Andrew
• Position: Book review

The Koran from a Vernacular Perspective: Vocabulary Strings and Composition Strata. By I. B. T. DAOUK. Erlangen: I. B. T. DAOUK, 2004. Pp. 220.

The story of Albert Einstein serves as an inspiration to many aspiring independent scholars. In 1905 Einstein wrote his famous paper introducing the special theory of relativity and had it accepted for publication in the scholarly journal Annalen der Physik, while he was working as a technical examiner in a government patent office in Berne. Academic positions were awarded to him only later in life. The moral of this story must be that efforts to write scholarly work outside the guild of academia are indeed worthwhile. Einstein's case demonstrates that the academy will not always resist ideas from the "outside." However, writers who are attempting to gain such recognition frequently convey the suspicion that there exists a conspiracy to keep the guild closed to new ideas, often arguing that the "outside" ideas are so revolutionary that it is not in the academy's self-interest to accept them; paranoia and anger become part of the subtext. Today, this attitude of suspicion often leads writers to take advantage of the economies of self-publishing (frequently on the Web); this, of course, results in a publication that lacks the stamp of peer evaluation, something which marks the work of someone such as Einstein.

The study of Islam, and especially the Qur'an, seems to attract many independent scholars. The most famous recent examples must surely be "Ibn Warraq," whose writing has a polemical edge attractive enough to engage an established publisher, and "Christoph Luxenberg" who, despite being an academic himself, is an outsider to the field of Islam (and, like "Ibn Warraq," hides behind a pseudonym). I. B. T. Daouk, having seen the success of Luxenberg's work, I suspect (see pp. 179-80), decided to proceed independently for the publication of his work. We learn little about the author within his book beyond the fact that he is a native speaker of Arabic (the most important qualification for writing this work, as will be seen), most likely from Lebanon, and that he has read (with a good deal of appreciation) most of the "canon" of works on the Qur'an in English and German and has some acquaintance with the major works of tafsir. For the most part, Daouk's tone is a calm and "scientific" one, putting forth the "facts" and leaving it to the reader to see the wisdom of his observations.

Using the methods of...