Proud Infidel ranting about the ongoing war against democratic and secular values (Don't fool yourselves)! Maybe a voice of sanity in a wide ocean of madness.

20080121

The Lost Archive

On the night of April 24, 1944, British air force bombers hammered a former Jesuit college here housing the Bavarian Academy of Science. The 16th-century building crumpled in the inferno. Among the treasures lost, later lamented Anton Spitaler, an Arabic scholar at the academy, was a unique photo archive of ancient manuscripts of the Quran.

The 450 rolls of film had been assembled before the war for a bold venture: a study of the evolution of the Quran, the text Muslims view as the verbatim transcript of God's word. The wartime destruction made the project "outright impossible," Mr. Spitaler wrote in the 1970s.

[Photo]

Mr. Spitaler was lying. The cache of photos survived, and he was sitting on it all along. The truth is only now dribbling out to scholars -- and a Quran research project buried for more than 60 years has risen from the grave.

"He pretended it disappeared. He wanted to be rid of it," says Angelika Neuwirth, a former pupil and protégée of the late Mr. Spitaler. Academics who worked with Mr. Spitaler, a powerful figure in postwar German scholarship who died in 2003, have been left guessing why he squirreled away the unusual trove for so long.

Spitaler was a well- known arabist with dubious connections to the nazi regime. Why did he hide these documents? They prooves that there has been many different verisions of the quran. The islamists and the muslims (same, same but different?) on their hand means that the quran is universal and that the book is God's direct words in print. That means that islam is the only world religion that can academilly be prooved to be wrong! Talk about a hot potato...

Ms. Neuwirth, a professor of Arabic studies at Berlin's Free University, now is overseeing a revival of the research. The project renews a grand tradition of German Quranic scholarship that was interrupted by the Third Reich. The Nazis purged Jewish experts on ancient Arabic texts and compelled Aryan colleagues to serve the war effort. Middle East scholars worked as intelligence officers, interrogators and linguists. Mr. Spitaler himself served, apparently as a translator, in the German-Arab Infantry Battalion 845, a unit of Arab volunteers to the Nazi cause, according to wartime records.

During the 19th century, Germans pioneered modern scholarship of ancient texts. Their work revolutionized understanding of Christian and Jewish scripture. It also infuriated some of the devout, who resented secular scrutiny of texts believed to contain sacred truths.

The revived Quran venture plays into a very modern debate: how to reconcile Islam with the modern world? Academic quarrying of the Quran has produced bold theories, bitter feuds and even claims of an Islamic Reformation in the making. Applying Western critical methods to Islam's holiest text is a sensitive test of the Muslim community's readiness to both accommodate and absorb thinking outside its own traditions.

Neuwirth, the professor that has taken over the archives, has locked them away in a bankvault and refuses to let anyone see them. Why?

Link to Wall Street Journal

4 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Your story about the hidden documents is interesting but not surprising taking into account many muslims weakness for Al-taqiyya. An interesting comment to the origin of the Quran can be found here http://debate.org.uk/topics/books/origins-koran.html.

Your finishing question is indeed very relevant.

Wednesday 23 January 2008 at 13:44:00 CET

 
Anonymous Anonymous said...

The link (above) isn't working; not surprising given the mood of Brits to suppress dialogue in matters relating to Islam.

Wednesday 23 January 2008 at 18:34:00 CET

 
Blogger pela68 said...

Hmm. It works for me. Maybe a temporary glitch?

Wednesday 23 January 2008 at 21:53:00 CET

 
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Yes, I made it through. Thank you.

Thursday 24 January 2008 at 03:49:00 CET

 

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