Islam Critiqued needs updating to recent scholarship; Original Syriac Quran?

In answer to the video "Abraham and the Kaaba: From Borrowed Stories to Sacred Scripture"

A strange claim by Christoph Luxenberg (later repeated by Sawma) is that, despite early documentary evidence of Arabic Qurans, and without providing a single piece of proof, he believes the “proto-Koran” and the “original Koranic text” were written by Arab Christians in Garshuni, meaning the transcription of the Arabic language using the Syrio-Aramaic script. It was not until 150 years after the advent of Islam that the Arabic script was used instead for the Quran. All earlier inscriptions were in fact made by Christians and had nothing to do with Islam.

For example he states that the dome of the rock inscription about Muhammad is actually a mistransltation and is speaking of Jesus. Yet the same phrase

"muhammadun abdullahi wa rasuluhu"

is translated in 1st century Arabic-Greek bilingual papyri as

"maamet apostolos theou" ie "Muhammad is the Messenger of God".

There are Christian Syriac apocalyptic texts contemporaneous with the inscriptions on the Dome of the Rock, mentioning its construction along with its "anti-Christian" Arabic inscriptions.

That is besides the known fact that we have nearly the entire Quran in the Arabic script, in scattered manuscripts all dated to the 1st century hijra, including hijazi manuscripts from the 1st half of the 1st century of hijra. This makes the time period between Uthman's codification of the Quran and the appearance of one of the earliest manuscript of the Quran, at most 20 years. How could this shifting of script occur so fast?

More recently, the university of Birmingham UK revealed the existence of a Quran manuscript, written in the early Hijazi script and containing suras 18 to 20, dated to between 568AD and 645AD which is at most 13 years after the prophet Muhammad's death. Only the parchment was dated, not the ink, so as to safeguard the manuscript. Some have used the occasion to claim the parchment was kept, its content erased so that it could be reused at a much later time. However, as noted by Bart Ehrman

"It is very difficult to test the ink on such documents, because to do so requires you to destroy the ink! And it takes a good bit of it to be enough to be checked. So in theory the parchment could be from the 7th century, but the ink from, say, the 14th. But in the judgment of most experts that would be highly unlikely. The only real reason for someone to use ancient parchment for a modern writing (when modern parchment would be in much better shape and easier to access and easier to use) is to make the writing look older than it was. That is something you might expect a modern forger to do, someone who knew that the parchment could be scientifically dated. But it’s not something that would be expected to be done in the Middle Ages. So more than likely the date of the parchment is pretty close to the date of the writing on it. As with all history, of course, this is simply a matter of probabilities, not certainties".

Scholars of the field, know that the Quran was closed text very early on in Islam. This fragment only confirmed what they already knew

(Shady Hekmat Nasser, university of Cambridge) "We already know from our sources that the Koran was a closed text very early on in Islam, and these discoveries only attest to the accuracy of these sources".

And as corroborated by Nicolai Sinai

"To be sure, one may well hold that the gamut of viable hypotheses about the date of the Quran has now shrunk to the seventh century, 9 thereby defusing some of the issue’s long-standing contentiousness".

Furthermore, a vast array of the Quran’s religious vocabulary is attested in old southern as well as sometimes northern Arabian epigraphy, without any linguistic and theological connection with the languages of the Christian Levant. 

Sulayman Dost "As we have seen, some of the most central concepts for the Qur’ān’s theological outlook have their solitary parallels in the religious, social and political idiom of the Arabian inscriptions. In some cases, there are exact lexical overlaps between the two sets of texts, i.e. the Qur’ān and the epigraphy, and, in some cases, the qur’anic equivalents of certain pre-Islamic concepts are given new semantic dimensions in line with the Qur’ān’s doctrinal stance. It is also worth noting that the Qur’ān’s description, albeit very short and elliptical, of pre-Islamic religious milieu can be largely followed through epigraphic evidence".

A very simple observation is that if the Quran had been an open text until the second half of the seventh century then, like other ancient writings, then its tumultuous historical context would have surely reflected within it. We would have seen anachronisms, traces, names, allusions to events and passionate Muslim debates, on laws and theology, the inter religious wars and other major events that had occured. The massive and fulgurant expansion of Muslim territories by that time would have surely been rewritten as retrospective prophecies. None of that is found in the Quran, unlike what happened with the Bible; from the successive destructions and rehabilitation of the Israelites, re-written as prophecies of punishment/reward, to Jesus' crucifixion re-cast as a divine suicide plan since the beginning of creation.

(Nicolai Sinai)"Hence, the argument that if the Quran had been an open text until the second half of the seventh century then, like other ancient writings, it somehow ought to reflect the historical context from which it supposedly emerged (albeit not necessarily by virtue of explicit name-dropping) still stands. As long as scholars have not managed to demonstrate that certain Quranic passages – and preferably, passages with a distinct stylistic and terminological profile! – are only intelligible, or best intelligible, when placed in a post-conquest context, a dating of the standard rasmto before 650 therefore seems heuristically preferable...the Quran lacks even the most editorially minimalist techniques of biographical contextualization, such as the insertion of superscriptions tying specific scriptural passages to certain events in Muḥammad’s life (see Isaiah 1:1, Jeremiah 1:1–3, and the various Psalmic superscriptions associating the following text with the life of David).136 The fact that the Quranic corpus as we have it is remarkably uncontaminated not only by fully-fledged sīra narratives but also by such minor redactional accretions is most easily accounted for by a mid-seventh century date for the standard rasm’s closure."

To further expound upon Luxenberg's theories. Christoph Luxenberg states that the Syro-Aramaic used in Edessa and its environs is the original language of the Quran, not Arabic, despite the Quran itself repeatedly saying about itself it is evident Arabic, in the language of the messenger's people 12:2,13:37,26:195,46:12,16:103,19:97,44:58,14:4. Neither does Luxenberg explain how this language might have come to dominate in far away Hijaz to such an extent that it would form the basis of the sacred writings of its inhabitants, nor does he present the slightest evidence that there existed in Mecca and its surroundings an Arab community under intense Christian influence.

These claims run along the same lines as those of the Protestant theologian Gunter Luling who theorized in the 1960 that this area was thoroughly christianized by Muhammad’s lifetime, and Mecca was a significant Christian town ruled by the Quraysh, a Christianized tribe that worshipped in the Kaaba, a Christian church built with an orientation toward Jerusalem. This assertion however remains unsubstantiated whether from Muslim or Christian sources, just as his assumption of a massive Christian presence in central and northwestern Arabia.

There are no Arabic inscriptions written in the Syriac script whereas there are quite a number of them written in Nabataean Aramaic script, the recognized origin of the Arabic script. Arabic was widely spoken in the Middle East by the 7th century CE, particularly in the region of the former Nabataean kingdom. This very evolution presumes frequent writing of Arabic in the Nabataean script. Some inscriptions prove that Arabic had already long been used for sacred expression, such as the Oboda inscription, and possibly also the ones found in the Madaba area. There is also Epiphanius of Salamis’ testimony as to the praises to a virgin deity sung in Arabic by the inhabitants of Petra and Elusa.

A well known Meccan inscription date to AH 98/717 CE is variously attributed to a bishop of Najran in southwest Arabia named Quss ibn Sa‘ida, or else to one of the pre-Islamic kings of Yemen.

Regardless of the authenticity of that attribution, the accumulation of pre-islamic evidence, including a vast wealth of poetry, does point to them belonging to that period. The pre-Islamic Arabic texts are nothing but the visible tip of the iceberg. Most of the hidden material is lost through the effect of time or in the process of being discovered. The point is that there is a substantial tradition of writing and speaking Arabic. Why would then the Quran's supposed authors need to express their sacred traditions in a far away foreign language?

As to methodology, Luxenberg starts by selecting Quranic passages with multiple layered meanings. HE then forces the consonantal Uthmanic text into parallel Syriac words he chooses based on what he deems is a more appropriate meaning of the passage. His whole point being to expose the Arab compilers of the text that came some century and half after Muhammad, as disconnected from the original Syriac substratum of the Quran. But this exercize wasnt unique to Luxenberg.

The background of other scholars engaged in a similar process is reflects in their findings. Thus those studying northwestern semitic languages will see Ugaritic behind obscure Quranic words, while those inclined to see Islam coming out of a Christian background would prefer syriac etymologies; those favoring a Jewish matrix would see Hebrew and Jewish Aramaic as the sources of many Quranic terms.