Islam: Beliefs And Institutions, by Lammens (Review by Asif Iqbal)
In his compendium Geschichte der arabischen Litteratur, Carl Brockelmann notes (Supplementband III, p. 208) the following about Lammens’ work: «dessen Siraforschungen mit ihrer gehässigen, islamfeindlichen Tendenz auch bei sonst ganz europäisch eingestellten Muslimen Abscheu und Empörung ausgelöst haben.»
i.e., “His research into the Life of Muhammad, with its vitriolic, hostile-to-Islam bias, triggered antipathy and outrage even with the otherwise entirely Europeanized Muslims.”
Ignoring the fact that such Muslims would have been “Europeanized” only in appearance and not at heart, and also disregarding the fact that Lammens’ anticipated “Life of Muhammad,” which never really appeared in print, was already hailed as “epoch-making” by such scientific scholars of Islam as Arthur Jeffery, we have Lammens’ own testimony in the foreword of this work under review that it is “neither controversial, nor polemical,” and “an entirely objective account.”
This work is a summary of Lammens’ research into the various aspects of Islam, sketching its salient features and recapitulating the most important conclusions at which he arrived, (for example on p. 24: Muhammad died at an age considerably younger than the traditional chronology allows; on p.32: Muhammad never thought of the socio-religious community he founded at Medina as a universal religion requiring conquests beyond the Arabian frontier; on pp. 69f: the concept of “Sunnah of the Prophet” was developed by the later generations of Muslims which forged the mechanism of the hadith to realize this concept).
A list of Lammens’ detailed works, which provide the basis for these conclusions, is provided in the bibliography (for example p 231 for the above-cited first conclusion; p 234 for the above-cited second and third conclusions). These detailed works are very hard to acquire, and this makes this book a valuable manual of Lammens’ research.
In it, he stated that "the most glaring anachronisms" in the Qur'an is "the story of the Samaritan (sic) who is alleged to have made the Jews worship the golden calf..."p. 39
- An online review of this book is available at:
http://www.flipkart.com/islam-h-lammens-beliefs-institutions/8170690978-wv23f95f3o
Famous quotes containing the words beliefs and/or institutions:
“To begin to use cultural forces for the good of our daughters we must first shake ourselves awake from the cultural trance we all live in. This is no small matter, to untangle our true beliefs from what we have been taught to believe about who and what girls and women are.”
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“You can’t talk about a kind of democracy unless those who are affected by decisions make those decisions whether the institutions in question be the welfare department, the university, the factory, the farm, the neighborhood, the country.”
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