Simon Hop­kins, Review of ​“Christoph Lux­en­berg”, Die syro-ara­maiche Lesart des Koran… [i.e., ​“The Syro-Ara­ma­ic Read­ing of the Qur’an..]

The fol­low­ing extract has been tak­en from the fol­low­ing review of Lux­en­berg’s book :

Review­er : Simon Hopkins.
Pub­lished in : JSAI, Vol. 28 (2003), pp. 377 – 380

It rein­forces the claim I have been mak­ing for ages that the real prob­lem is not in Lux­en­berg’s inter­pre­ta­tion of this or that term, so that a clever selec­tion from his book would enable us to arrive at an all-cor­rect set of Lux­en­berg’s Qur’an­ic inter­pre­ta­tions. Instead, the real prob­lem lies in his fun­da­men­tal hypoth­e­sis and at the very root of his stance. Con­se­quent­ly, this false start ren­ders erro­neous even those sec­ondary con­clu­sions of his, which oth­er­wise stand in har­mo­ny with the research­es of the main­stream Qur’an­ic scholars.

In oth­er words, his entire book is an erro­neous out­come of a false hypothesis.

Now, the extract of Simon Hopkins :

“Quite apart from the way­ward philol­o­gy and exeget­i­cal caprice exem­pli­fied above [see pp. 378, 379], the book makes no attempt to place its find­ings in any plau­si­ble his­tor­i­cal con­text. Who were the Chris­t­ian inhab­i­tants of the pre-Islam­ic Mec­ca who used the alleged Qur’an­ic ​“ara­maisch-ara­bis­che Mis­chsprache” [i.e., Ara­ma­ic-Ara­bic mixed lan­guage], and what exact­ly were their Syr­i­ac writ­ings which are sup­posed to have pro­duced the Ara­bic Qur’an. How does the the­o­ry account for the Jew­ish ele­ments in Mus­lim scrip­ture, and how did the ear­ly Islam­ic exegetes man­age to achieve so thor­ough­ly a mis­un­der­stand­ing -? [some­thing which Lux­en­berg claims on the p. 83 of his book] — of their holy book ? Indeed, how did they come to have such a holy book — [mean­ing a book with such alleged ​“mixed-lan­guage”] — at all ? One will read­i­ly con­cede that the text of the Qur’an is fraught with prob­lems. It is dif­fi­cult, how­ev­er, to believe that many (or indeed any) of them have been solved by Mr Lux­en­berg’s book.” (p. 380).

Read the off­print [in .pdf for­mat, requires Adobe Acro­bat Reader]