Christian Lectionary the Source of the Koran?
According to Wikipedia research done by an august German philologist Christoph Luxenberg claims that the Koran was originally written in Syriac (Syro-Aramaic) not in Arabic. In addition Christoph Luxenberg states that the Koran is also based on lectionaries used in Syrian Christian churches.
Christoph Luxenberg is also a professor of ancient Semitic and Arabic languages and he has done extensive research in the origins of the Koran. He wrote his findings in a book titled 'The Syro-Aramaic Reading of the Koran'. [emphasis mine]
This book takes a philological and text-critical approach to the study of the Koran and is considered a major, but controversial work in the field of Koranic philology. The work advances the thesis that the content of critical sections of the Koran has been broadly misread by succeeding generations of readers through a faulty and exclusive reliance on the assumption that classical Arabic formed the foundation of the Koran whereas linguistic analysis of the text suggests that the prevalent Syro-Aramaic language up to the 7th century formed a stronger etymological basis for its meaning.
Luxenberg, like many scholars before him, remarks that the Koran contains much ambiguous and even inexplicable language. He asserts that even Muslim scholars find some passages difficult to parse and have written reams of Koranic commentary attempting to explain these passages. However, the assumption behind their endeavors has always been that any difficult passage is true, meaningful, and pure Arabic, and that it can be deciphered with the tools of traditional Muslim scholarship. Luxenberg accuses Western academic scholars of the Koran of taking a timid and imitative approach, relying too heavily on the biased work of Muslim scholars. Luxenberg argues that scholars must start afresh, ignore the old Islamic commentaries, and use only the latest in linguistic and historical methods. Hence, if a particular Koranic word or phrase seems meaningless in Arabic, or can be given meaning only by tortured conjectures, it makes sense -- he argues -- to look to the Aramaic and Syriac languages as well as Arabic. Luxenberg also argues that the Koran is based on earlier texts, namely lectionaries used in the Christian churches of Syria, and that it was the work of several generations who adapted these texts into the Koran we know today.
The word Koran itself is derived from 'qeryana', a Syriac term from the Christian liturgy that means ‘lectionary’ a book of [Christian] liturgical readings. The book being a Syro-Aramaic lectionary, with hymns and Biblical extracts, created for use in Christian services. This lectionary was translated into Arabic as a missionary effort. It was not meant to start a new religion, but to spread an older one. The word huri, usually interpreted by generations of readers as wide-eyed virgins (who will serve the faithful in Paradise; Koran 44:54, 52:20 ,55:72, 56:22) actually means white grapes. He says that many Christian descriptions of Paradise describe it as abounding in pure white grapes. This sparked much joking in the Western press; suicide bombers would be expecting beautiful women and getting grapes. The Koranic passage in Sura 24 commanding women to cover themselves, one of the texts on which the doctrine of hijab is based, actually commands women to "snap their belts around their waists". The passage in Sura 33 that has usually been translated as "seal of the prophets" actually means "witness". By this reading, Muhammad is not the greatest of the prophets, but only a witness to those prophets who came before him. The Koran was composed in a mixed Arabic-Syriac language, the traders' language of Mecca. The interpretative mistakes that were made by the first commentators suggests that there must have been a gap in the oral transmission of the Koran.
