A Challenge to Islam for Reformation: The Rediscovery and Reliable Reconstruction of a Comprehensive Pre-Islamic Christian Hymnal Hidden in the Koran under Earliest Islamic Reinterpretations.

• Author: Steigerwald, Diana
• Position: Book Review

A Challenge to Islam for Reformation: The Rediscovery and Reliable Reconstruction of a Comprehensive Pre-Islamic Christian Hymnal Hidden in the Koran under Earliest Islamic Reinterpretations. By GUNTER LULING. Delhi: MOTILAL BANARSIDASS, 2003. Pp. 580.

The Qur'an was delivered, despite a long period of compilation (twenty-four years), in a fairly original format. A small part of the Qur'an is hard to understand because its symbolic meanings are difficult to unravel. To disclose its meanings, we may rely on medieval exegetes (mufassirun) and a good knowledge of the grammar and lexicography of classical Arabic. Readers must be very careful because some verses have contextual meaning that cannot be easily generalized. The usual understanding depends greatly on medieval commentators who sometimes had not properly mastered the classical Arabic language. Some passages, which are believed to have been understood, probably need to be revised and understood in their original meanings. According to Luling, the historical-critical textual analysis is a useful method but was not applied to the Qur'an, as it was to the Bible or other old sacred texts. In the field of Qur'anic text criticism, over the last decades only two scholars, Christoph Luxenberg and Gunter Luling, have used this method.

Lulings's original work was in German, published as Uber den Urkoran: Ansatze zur Rekonstruktion der vorislamisch-christlichen Strophenlieder im Koran, 2nd rev. ed. (Erlangen: Verlagsbuchhandlung H. Luling, 1993), first published in 1977. This work was initially a Ph.D. thesis (p. xviii) submitted in 1969. In 1970, one official of the university told him that "his results are unwelcome" to some elders of German academia (Islamic and Arabic Studies), and as a consequence he was dismissed from the University of Erlangen (Bavaria). The book's first edition was reviewed by Erhart Kahle in Zeitschrift der Deutschen Morgenlandishen Gesellschaft 132 (1982): 182-84, who stated: "What Luling is displaying in his work is pure paradigm-destroying research and will earn him all difficulty with his scholar colleagues" (cf. p. xvii).

In his very long preface (xi-lxvii) the author explains the genesis of his book and the amplification of the third edition in English. In the introduction (pp. 1-25) he elaborates four hypotheses: (1) "The text of the Qur'an as transmitted by Muslim Orthodoxy contains, hidden behind it as a ground layer and considerably scattered throughout it...