Christoph Luxenberg - Responses

Responses

Richard Kroes describes Luxenberg's book in a review article as "almost unreadable, certainly for the layman. One needs knowledge of eight languages (German, English, French, Latin, Greek, Hebrew, Arabic and Syriac) and of five different alphabets (Latin, Greek, Hebrew, Arabic, Estrangelo) to comprehend the book fully. A good working knowledge of German, Arabic and Syriac is indispensable to be able to assess the book. (It must be noted that one cannot seriously blame the author here: in this sense the work is no more demanding than any other similar German publication in the tradition of robust, erudite German scholarship.) Luxenberg's main problem however is that his line of reasoning doesn't follow the simple and strict method that he set out at the beginning of his book." Conclusive remarks about the book are expressed as "certainly not everything Luxenberg writes is nonsense or too far-fetched, but quite a few of his theories are doubtful and motivated too much by a Christian apologetic agenda. Even his greatest critics admit he touches on a field of research that was touched on by others before and that deserves more attention. However, this needs to be done with a strictly scientific approach. In fact, his investigations should be done again, taking into account all the scholarly work that Luxenberg doesn't seem to know."

A March 2002 New York Times article describes Luxenberg's research:

"Luxenberg, a scholar of ancient Semitic languages, argues that the Koran has been misread and mistranslated for centuries. His work, based on the earliest copies of the Koran, maintains that parts of Islam's holy book are derived from pre-existing Christian Aramaic texts that were misinterpreted by later Islamic scholars who prepared the editions of the Koran commonly read today. So, for example, the virgins who are supposedly awaiting good Islamic martyrs as their reward in paradise are in reality "white raisins" of crystal clarity rather than fair maidens. . . . The famous passage about the virgins is based on the word hur, which is an adjective in the feminine plural meaning simply "white." Islamic tradition insists the term hur stands for houri, which means "virgin," but Luxenberg insists that this is a forced misreading of the text. In both ancient Aramaic and in at last one respected dictionary of early Arabic hur means "white raisin."

In 2002, The Guardian newspaper published an article which stated:

"Luxenberg tries to show that many obscurities of the Koran disappear if we read certain words as being Syriac and not Arabic. We cannot go into the technical details of his methodology but it allows Luxenberg, to the probable horror of all Muslim males dreaming of sexual bliss in the Muslim hereafter, to conjure away the wide-eyed houris promised to the faithful in suras XLIV.54; LII.20, LV.72, and LVI.22. Luxenberg 's new analysis, leaning on the Hymns of Ephrem the Syrian, yields "white raisins" of "crystal clarity" rather than doe-eyed, and ever willing virgins—the houris. Luxenberg claims that the context makes it clear that it is food and drink that is being offered, and not unsullied maidens or houris."

In 2003, the Pakistani government banned a 2003 issue of Newsweek's international edition discussing Luxenberg's thesis on grounds that it was offensive to Islam.

Muslim sources have accused Luxenberg of participating in an "discursive assault on Islam," but he has also been called an enabler of interfaith dialogue; a "dilettante"; and the writer of "probably the most important book ever written on the Koran."