Muslim Heretics Conference

From The Sunday Times

February 10, 2008

The family of the first Islamic soldier to be killed fighting the Taliban tells of his sense of duty and the hostility of other Muslims

Shiraz Maher

Just days before the first anniversary of the 7/7 London terrorist attacks, news emerged of a young Muslim killed while fighting in a foreign land, thousands of miles from home. “It was 2.30 in the morning when my younger sister woke me to say there were two men knocking on the door,” Zeeshan Hashmi recalls. “I knew instantly it was about my brother.”

But Zeeshan’s brother Jabron, 24, was no terrorist. The men were from the Ministry of Defence and told him that Lance-Corporal Hashmi had died while fighting the Taliban in Helmand province.

Even now, to be a Muslim fighting with the British in Iraq or Afghanistan is controversial. Only last month Parviz Khan pleaded guilty to plotting to kidnap a Muslim British soldier and “behead him like a pig”. When Jabron died the family did not know what to expect.

A visiting imam lambasted the young serviceman, and fears that Islamist groups would disrupt funeral proceedings at the Central Jamia mosque in Birmingham prompted the West Midlands police to provide an escort for the funeral cortege.

In the event, the funeral passed without incident. Zeeshan says he is not surprised by the number of wellwishers who packed the mosque’s prayer hall for Jabron’s final rites: “He was my brother, but he didn’t just belong to me. He was from the community and represented them.”

Jabron’s family live among the rows of anonymous terraced houses in Small Heath, an area of acute Muslim concentration in Birmingham. Over coffee at their house, Zeeshan and his sister Zoubia admit that they found Jabron’s critics “hypocritical” and suggest that extremists are “creating greater divides in society”, but they refuse to condemn those who celebrated Jabron’s death.

“They have their opinions,” Zeeshan says, “but they’re not something I’d ever accept.”

Born and raised in Pakistan’s lawless North West Frontier Province, just 40 minutes from the Afghan border, Zeeshan and his brother were enrolled on a “hafiz” course in their local madrasah, a process by which students commit the Koran to memory.

The family moved to Birmingham in 1994, when Zeeshan went to college to take his GCSEs. He served as a soldier in 2000-5, completing two tours of duty in Afghanistan.

“I chose to be here,” he says, “and we should be like anyone else and give back to our society in whatever way, whether it’s joining the army or the civil service or being a doctor – that’s up to you.”

Zeeshan says that before joining the British Army he visited Pakistan and told an imam of his intentions. “He was delighted,” Zeeshan says.

He understands why many young Muslims are finding it difficult to unravel what they regard as competing loyalties, but says the upbringing that he and Jabron enjoyed meant this was never a problem.

What worries him is that his brother’s death may somehow have inspired the plot to kidnap and kill a Muslim British soldier. It was – literally – close to home. Khan was arrested during raids on a dozen addresses in the Hashmi family’s neighbourhood, including a bookshop in an adjacent street.

Khan’s plot marks a worrying shift in Al-Qaeda’s strategy in the West.

Whereas previous acts of terrorism have been indiscriminate, threatening the population as a whole, this plot was more specific, targeting Muslims whom Khan regarded as traitors because they were collaborating with the security apparatus of the British state. The message he intended to send to other Muslims was clear: if you integrate, you are a target for attack.

As a former soldier himself, Zeeshan is philosophical about the dangers faced by Muslim servicemen. “Extremism has always existed.

Previously the IRA killed off-duty servicemen. As a soldier you know what you’re getting into,” he says. “Obviously I’m aware, but I’m not really scared.”

He accepts that fears of reprisals have discouraged some Muslims from joining the army, but admits that there are other difficulties too.

“I’m glad I wasn’t deployed to Iraq,” he concedes. “But if I had been asked to go, I would have gone. It’s a professional army and you go where the orders are given.”

He tells me that most of his Muslim friends in the army have been deployed to Iraq, but fails to see how their personal reservations, either about the conflict’s validity or about the shambolic and largely nonexistent reconstruction planning, are any different from the concerns of their nonMuslim counterparts. “You do your job and raise your concerns within the system, just like any ordinary citizen,” he says, before pointing out the violence that Muslims have inflicted against one another, particularly in Pakistan and Iraq.

Explaining Jabron’s motivation to join the army, Zeeshan quotes the prophet Muhammad saying that actions are judged by intention.

“He went to Afghanistan hoping to build bridges between the East and the West. He combined his love of Islam with the love of Britain and his main reason for joining the army was to make a difference. He certainly did that.”

His commitment is something that the family is keen to honour. Two pictures of Jabron, dressed in full military regalia and beaming with a glowing smile, have pride of place in the living room, alongside copies of the Koran and rolled-up prayer mats.

His mother and three sisters were also invited to lay the foundation stone for a new war memorial unveiled by the Queen last year in Staffordshire to commemorate British soldiers killed since 1945 in conflicts, peacekeeping missions and terrorist attacks.

“Has all this been worth it?” I ask. Zeeshan points out that the timing of Jabron’s death was significant. Coming just days before the first anniversary of the July 7 attacks, it contrasted the positive contribution that young Muslims can make against the horrors they have sometimes perpetrated.

Although some of the arrested men behind the latest plot were taken from within his own community, Zeeshan is sanguine but not naive about the future.

“We all have to break the barriers ourselves. Jabron’s death reflects on Muslims generally, not just my family,” he says. “Being Muslim does not restrict us from bring British.”

My brother died for Britain and Islam says family of first soldier to be killed fighting the Taliban (The Times Online)

Islam and the law

What role for sharia in the West?

Feb 9th 2008
From Economist.com

A row in Britain after an Archbishop says that Muslims might live, in part, by separate legal rules

AFP

STEEPED in a culture of emollience, gentility and the avoidance of hard arguments, England’s established Church has little knowledge of how to handle public opinion when it suddenly finds itself in the eye of a gigantic storm. And, for better or worse, the country’s politically-active Muslims are capable of showing much greater deftness and sophistication.

That is one conclusion from the furore that has followed a series of controversial statements about Islam and the law by Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury. In a lecture, he suggested that the British authorities would inevitably have to make some accommodation with sharia, the Muslim legal system; he also noted, in a radio interview, that certain provisions of sharia are already recognised in British society and under British law.

“What a burkha” declared the Sun newspaper, alongside a picture of a head-covered figure making a rude gesture. To judge by the tone of the British press (and not only the tabloid press), the Archbishop—who is also the leader of the worldwide Anglican Communion, numbering 80m people—might have been advocating the mandatory covering of every female British head, plus the instant introduction of amputation, whipping and stoning for the most trivial misdemeanours.

In fact, of course, he said nothing of the kind. But what he did advocate was not uncontroversial: he suggested there could be a “plural jurisdiction” in which Muslims could freely decide whether disputes (in which only co-religionists were involved) were resolved in secular courts or by Islamic institutions which offer an alternative forum for arbitration.

As long as the decision to seek, and abide by, a form of arbitration is freely made, it is hard to see how any secular legal system could actually ban people from using it. But the extent to which state law can recognise and “use” decisions made by such private arbitration services is a difficult grey area. And perhaps—to interpret the Archbishop charitably—he was merely pointing out that such difficulties are bound to grow.

In any case, for those who are already making political capital by playing on people’s fears of multi-culturalism, the speech by the Archbishop was a gift And for some of the people who are concerned to defend the cultural rights of Muslims, both the speech and the reaction it prompted were an embarrassment, to put it mildly.

A spokesman for Gordon Brown, the prime minister, declared firmly that “British law should apply and…should be based on British values” and that in no circumstances could Muslim legal principles be used to let people violate the law of the land.

But the Muslim Council of Britain, an umbrella organisation which is often criticised for the stridency of its cultural demands, made a better fist of defending what it called the Archbishop’s “thoughtful intervention” than any Anglican did. The Anglican prelate had not been calling for a parallel penal code, or for the existence of two different legal systems, the MCB noted. All the Archbishop was implying was that Muslims should enjoy parity with other religious comunities, like the Jews, who have set up their own institutions to arbitrate disputes and interpret religious rules.

In any case, the reality to which the Archbishop was referring is palpable enough: there are already plenty of sub-cultures in Britain where people choose to regulate their behaviour, in matters like diet, marital status and inheritance, by a set of self-imposed norms which may differ quite sharply from the remainder of society.

The big question, for any secularist advocate of the rule of law, is whether people who participate in these sub-cultures really have a right to opt out, or to indeed to move from one cultural world to another.

The entitlement of sub-cultures to exist can easily become inimical to freedom if vulnerable individuals (such as women and children) are in effect trapped inside them because of massive pressure not to “betray” the community. The Archbishop would have drawn a much less hostile reaction if he had remembered to make that point more firmly.

Islam and the Law: What role for sharia in the West? (The Economist)

Technorati Tags: Islam,UK,Archbishop

ISTANBUL, February 8 (Compass Direct News) – The Iranian parliament may mandate the death penalty for citizens who leave Islam, a human rights group announced this week.

For the first time in Iranian history, a proposed penal code demands the death penalty for “apostates,” according to a February 5 statement by the Institute on Religion and Public Policy (IRPP).

“Apostasy was always illegal, but the court could hand down a jail term, hard labor or the death penalty,” said IRPP President Joseph Grieboski. “Now apostasy [would only] get the death penalty.”

Iran has used the “apostasy” law to target Muslim converts to Christianity, liberal thinkers and members of Iran’s Baha’i religious minority.

“This is not something new, they just want to be more harsh towards those who are leaving Islam,” an Iranian pastor told Compass.

No converts to Christianity have been convicted of “apostasy” since international pressure forced officials to drop the death sentence of Christian convert Mehdi Dibaj in 1994. But in the years following the convert’s release, Dibaj and four other Protestant pastors, both converts and those working with converts, have been brutally murdered.

The murderers of the Christians have never been brought to justice. Local believers suspect the government played a role in the killings.

“They began assassinating pastors and Christian workers,” said the Iranian pastor, who requested anonymity. “Legally, they did not take them to court, but they just killed them and said that they hanged themselves and gave some other excuses.”

‘Hardship’ for Women

The penal code proposal, already approved by the Iranian cabinet a month ago, appears to have the necessary parliamentary backing to be passed, an Iranian Christian told Compass.

Article 225 of the draft, posted on the IRPP website, stipulates two kinds of “apostasy,” “innate and parental,” both of which warrant the death penalty.

Innate “apostates” are those who grow up with at least one Muslim parent, are Muslims at the age of maturity and then later leave the faith, the article states.

“Punishment for an Innate Apostate is death,” section seven of the article stipulates.

Known as “parental apostates,” citizens who grow up in non-Muslim homes, convert to Islam as adults and then later decide to leave are to be given a chance to repent before their execution, the draft states.

“… After the final sentencing for three days, he/she would be guided to the right path and encouraged to recant his/her belief,” the article stipulates. “… If he/she refused, the death penalty would be carried out.”

Though sections of the draft appear to indicate that both men and women can be executed for apostasy, others limit execution to males who leave Islam. Section 225-10 states that convicted female “apostates” will be imprisoned for life.

The proposed law stipulates that “hardship” will be exercised on a female “apostate,” who will be immediately released if she recants. “The condition of hardship will be determined according to the religious laws,” the draft states.

Death Penalty for Drunkard

It remains unclear how far the government will go in implementing the revised apostasy law. In recent years no Christians are known to have been convicted of apostasy.

In May 2005 a former military officer and Muslim convert to Christianity was acquitted of apostasy by an Islamic court in Bandar-i Bushehr.

“This [new penal code] might open the hands of the fanatics to do more harm,” said the Iranian pastor. “It just depends which group [in the government] has more power, the radicals or the moderates.”

The new draft also extends the government’s jurisdiction to all actions taken outside of Iran, the IRPP reported. Article 112-3-1 of the draft refers to actions against “the internal and external security of the country,” but leaves the definition of “security” open to interpretation.

“Our concern lies in the fact that any movement anywhere can be tried if the government considers it being against Islam,” IRPP president Grieboski said.

A number of crimes, including repeated drunkenness, rape, murder, armed robbery, drug trafficking, “apostasy,” adultery and male homosexuality are capital offenses in Iran.

Last week, a Tehran criminal court sentenced a 22-year-old man to death after he was caught a fourth time in possession of alcohol and in a state of drunkenness.

At least 28 convicts were executed in January, the BBC reported. According to the news agency, human rights groups said that Iran carried out the death penalty on nearly 300 people last year.

Iran: Death Penalty Proposed for ‘Apostates’ (Compass Direct News)

Barney Zwartz
February 9, 2008

AUSTRALIAN Muslims already follow sharia, or Islamic law, by obeying Australian law and are not lobbying for Islamic family courts, according to a leading Melbourne Muslim, Sherene Hassan.

Ms Hassan, spokeswoman for the Islamic Council of Victoria, said that according to sharia Muslims who lived in non-Muslim countries were obliged to obey that country’s laws.

“It’s not a pressing issue for the community. Sharia law is not something we are lobbying for at all,” she said.

In 2005 the Federal Government rejected the idea of sharia courts to rule on Muslim divorces, saying Australian law was secular and applied to all equally regardless of religion.

Australia’s Attorney-General, Robert McClelland, said last night: “The Rudd Government is not considering and will not consider the introduction of any part of sharia law into the Australian legal system.”

Opposition Leader Brendan Nelson was also scathing about the idea, which he branded “a ham sandwich to a crocodile”.

Yasser Soliman, a member of former prime minister John Howard’s Muslim Reference Group and president of the Victorian Islamic Family and Childcare Agency, said the introduction of limited sharia would need broad community approval.

“It would have to be accepted by the wider community because there has been quite a lot of injustice happening in recent times under the name of sharia,” Mr Soliman said. Another complication is that there are several schools of Islamic law, so that it can be difficult for Muslims to agree about what sharia requires.

Australia’s Jewish community has a religious court, the Beth Din, that community members can use to resolve some disputes.

Chairman of Melbourne’s Anglican Social Responsibilities Commission, Ray Cleary, said it was a complex and emotional issue, but Australian law was based on the Judaeo-Christian tradition, and should remain so.

Australia’s Muslims cool on change (The Age)

Syed Badrul Ahsan

Mohammad Ali Syed subtitles his work as ‘A Progressive View’, which certainly points to the kind of case he makes for his interpretation of Islamic rules and conventions as they apply to women. Syed has little patience with the proponents of radical Islam, those whose view of the faith embraces some of the most conservative, indeed fanatic assessments of the position Muslim women should hold in society. The increasing alarm that in recent times has been raised over such issues as the use of the niqab and hijab by Muslim women does not, for the writer, emphasise the core of the Islamic faith and indeed goes against history. Not for him the bigotry which has long characterised (and still does characterise) the status of women in Islam. Not for him, therefore, an acquiescence in the thought that women in Islam belong in one place, in this instance the four walls of a male-dominated home.

And Syed should know, given his years of practice of the law and study of historical Islamic society. Something of his background also helps. His father was a prominent Muslim politician in pre- and post-partition India and in his own way was an individual who set much store by a modern, liberal interpretation of Islam. The stream of Syed’s thoughts in this work is therefore palpable. He makes a beginning through presenting the complex history of the Quran and Hadiths, but especially the latter, considering that the Hadiths for hundreds of years have served as an underpinning of Muslim thought. The Hadiths, being the sayings of the Prophet of Islam, are of course a major determining factor in any pursuit of Islamic cultural, religious and political traditions. The trouble, though, is that throughout the ages, since the death of Prophet Muhammad, (Pbuh) an entire body of questionable Hadiths has arisen which has readily been seized upon by ill-educated and ill-informed preachers as a weapon to be employed in a sustained struggle against liberality.

Syed spends a good length of time illustrating the nature and history of the Hadiths, before moving off to the issue confronting him. Women, he puts it plainly, enjoy the same degree of rights as men. He thus slices through the notion of Islam being a place for only macho men ready to order women around. He quotes the Prophet (M 13:11): “The most excellent of you is he who is best in the treatment of his wife”. And yet, as in M 15:19 T 10:11, there is a caveat which follows the advice on treating women: “And be careful of your duty to God in the matter of women, for you have taken them as the trust of God . .

The question of purdah occupies critical space in Mohammad Ali Syed’s arguments. His opinion holds that women in Persia and India had been bound to a purdah system long before the arrival of Islam in their lives. Purdah is therefore a reality that has little to do with Islam, or so the author puts it to his readers. But Syed does not rest on his interpretations of purdah alone. He goes back to the Quran for a vindication of his thoughts: “Say to the believing men that they should lower their gaze and guard their modesty: that will make for greater purity for them: and God is well acquainted with all that they do” (24:30). In 24:31, this is the instruction that goes out in relation to women: “And say to the believing women that they should lower their gaze and guard their modesty; that they should not display their beauty and ornaments (zeenatahunna) except what (must ordinarily) appear thereof; that they should draw their veils over their bosoms and not display their beauty except to their husbands, their fathers, their husbands’ fathers, their sons, their husbands’ sons, their brothers or their brothers’ sons . . . and they should not strike their feet in order to draw attention to their hidden ornaments . . .”

Syed quotes Mohammad Ali, whose historical analysis regarding women covering their bosoms dates back to pre-Islamic Arabia, when women sought to demonstrate their beauty through an uncovering of their breasts (or perhaps it was a matter of cleavage here?) although they had their head coverings in place.
Freedom of movement for Muslim women soon comes under Syed’s scrutiny. He goes back to some relevant Hadiths to explain why independence is a right for Muslim women. In B 11:12, it is thus stated, “The Prophet (peace be upon him) said, ‘Do not prohibit the handmaids of Allah from going to the mosques of Allah’.” Again, in B 10:162, comes this: “The Prophet (peace be upon him) said, ‘If a woman wanted to go to the mosque at night, she should not be prohibited from doing so’.” Such freedom, argues Syed, goes beyond the parameters of the mosque: “The Prophet (pbuh) said, ‘When the wife of one of you asks permission to go out she should not be prohibited from doing so’.” History also bears testimony to women’s freedom in Islam: “In the mosques the women were not forbidden to speak to the men. Once Hazrat Ayesha could not hear the last part of the sermon of the Prophet (pbuh) as his companions (ahsabs) were crying loudly and then she had asked a man sitting by her side . . . ‘May God be kind to you. Could you tell me what were the last words of the Prophet?’ The man said that the Prophet (pbuh) had said, ‘It has been revealed to me that you have to face the test of the grave before the test of your dajjal’.”

The Quran, notes Syed, is silent on the issue of whether or not women can become heads of Muslim states. And yet the Quran does not deny women the opportunity of pursuing a political life or providing leadership to governments. The author is dismissive of men who have long used isolated or ahad Hadiths to deny women a role of leadership in politics. Syed holds up Ayesha as an exemplar of free Islamic womanhood. And then he goes on to cite the tales of other women in Islam. In the late fifteenth century, Hurrah Malika Arwa Binte Ahmed provided leadership to Yemen province under the Fatimid caliphs Mustansir, Moost’Ali and Amir. When Amir died, she became sole ruler of Yemen.

Faith, tradition and the world of Islam’s women (The Daily Star)

Is democracy only a western concept?

by Shariq on 2nd April, 2006 at 4:55 am    

The belief in the allegedly ‘Western’ nature of democracy is often linked to the early practice of voting and elections in Greece, especially in Athens. Democracy involves more than balloting, but even in the history of voting there would be a classificatory arbitrariness in defining civilizations in largely racial terms.
…
[T]there is reluctance in taking note of the Greek intellectual links with other civilizations to the east or south of Greece, despite the greater interest that the Greeks themselves showed in talking to Iranians, or Indians, or Egyptians (rather than in chatting up the Ostrogoths).

Amartya Sen in the World Street Journal (via 3QuarksDaily) makes a compelling argument. For me the two key themes are:
a) Democracy isn’t Western
b) The West doesn’t own democracy.
These overlap nicely to create a coherent critique of the false west/non-west dichotomy. That democracy isn’t just a western concept is an important argument for those who aren’t western.

Sen provides examples of leaders such as Mandela and Gandhi who combined modern notions of democracy with ative traditions. While these may not have contained things such as voting, Sen argues that they were similar to modern democratic system in many ways. Take this example:

…the Great Mughal emperor Akbar (who was born a Muslim and died a Muslim) had just finished, in Agra, his large project of legally codifying minority rights, including religious freedom for all, along with championing regular discussions between followers of Islam, Hinduism, Jainism, Judaism, Zoroastrianism and other beliefs (including atheism).

This is where the second point comes in. As Sen points out, seeing Iranian dissidents as ‘ambassadors for Western values’, is both incorrect and counter-productive. As another example, why should an Afghan convert to Christianity be executed for apostasy? As Muslims we should not consider it either a humane or rational thing to do (Ali Eteraz has a detailed analysis). The West can contribute to this discourse by making their voices of protestation heard, however it should be done in the spirit of reflection rather than triumphalist conversion.

Sunny adds:
Amartya Sen’s newest book has just come out: Identity and Violence: The Illusion of Destiny. He made some excellent points on British multi-culturalism that Jay Singh previously mentioned here.

Another article by Sen caught my eye this week. In Slate he focuses on religious identity and the Danish cartoons controversy:

The increasing tendency to overlook the many identities that any human being has and to try to classify individuals according to a single allegedly pre-eminent religious identity is an intellectual confusion that can animate dangerous divisiveness.

An Islamist instigator of violence against infidels may want Muslims to forget that they have any identity other than being Islamic. What is surprising is that those who would like to quell that violence promote, in effect, the same intellectual disorientation by seeing Muslims primarily as members of an Islamic world.

Spot on. This happens all the time, most notably during the Paris riots when our right-wing friends were promoting it as an attempt by African/Arab French to ‘establish’ an intafada. The hyperbole spouted by The Spectator with its ‘Eurabia’ cover was quite amusing and a perfect example of this foolishness.

Anyway, both articles are worth reading for the depth of knowledge and understanding by this fine intellectual. One of these days, we need him blogging on here

Pickled Politics » Is democracy only a western concept?

Scholars Scrutinize the Koran’s Origin

A Promise of Moist Virgins or Dried Fruit?

New York Times (and International Herald Tribune), March 4, 2002

Scholars Are Quietly Offering New Theories of the Koran
By ALEXANDER STILLE

To Muslims the Koran is the very word of God, who spoke through the Angel Gabriel to Muhammad: "This book is not to be doubted," the Koran declares unequivocally at its beginning. Scholars and writers in Islamic countries who have ignored that warning have sometimes found themselves the target of death threats and violence, sending a chill through universities around the world.

Yet despite the fear, a handful of experts have been quietly investigating the origins of the Koran, offering radically new theories about the text’s meaning and the rise of Islam.

Christoph Luxenberg, a scholar of ancient Semitic languages in Germany, argues that the Koran has been misread and mistranslated for centuries. His work, based on the earliest copies of the Koran, maintains that parts of Islam’s holy book are derived from pre-existing Christian Aramaic texts that were misinterpreted by later Islamic scholars who prepared the editions of the Koran commonly read today.

So, for example, the virgins who are supposedly awaiting good Islamic martyrs as their reward in paradise are in reality "white raisins" of crystal clarity rather than fair maidens.

Christoph Luxenberg, however, is a pseudonym, and his scholarly tome The Syro-Aramaic Reading of the Koran had trouble finding a publisher, although it is considered a major new work by several leading scholars in the field. Verlag Das Arabische Buch in Berlin ultimately published the book.

The caution is not surprising. Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses received a fatwa because it appeared to mock Muhammad. The Egyptian novelist Naguib Mahfouz was stabbed because one of his books was thought to be irreligious. And when the Arab scholar Suliman Bashear argued that Islam developed as a religion gradually rather than emerging fully formed from the mouth of the Prophet, he was injured after being thrown from a second-story window by his students at the University of Nablus in the West Bank. Even many broad-minded liberal Muslims become upset when the historical veracity and authenticity of the Koran is questioned.

The reverberations have affected non-Muslim scholars in Western countries. "Between fear and political correctness, it’s not possible to say anything other than sugary nonsense about Islam," said one scholar at an American university who asked not to be named, referring to the threatened violence as well as the widespread reluctance on United States college campuses to criticize other cultures.

While scriptural interpretation may seem like a remote and innocuous activity, close textual study of Jewish and Christian scripture played no small role in loosening the Church’s domination on the intellectual and cultural life of Europe, and paving the way for unfettered secular thought. "The Muslims have the benefit of hindsight of the European experience, and they know very well that once you start questioning the holy scriptures, you don’t know where it will stop," the scholar explained.

The touchiness about questioning the Koran predates the latest rise of Islamic militancy. As long ago as 1977, John Wansbrough of the School of Oriental and African Studies in London wrote that subjecting the Koran to "analysis by the instruments and techniques of biblical criticism is virtually unknown."

Mr. Wansbrough insisted that the text of the Koran appeared to be a composite of different voices or texts compiled over dozens if not hundreds of years. After all, scholars agree that there is no evidence of the Koran until 691 ? 59 years after Muhammad’s death ? when the Dome of the Rock mosque in Jerusalem was built, carrying several Koranic inscriptions.

These inscriptions differ to some degree from the version of the Koran that has been handed down through the centuries, suggesting, scholars say, that the Koran may have still been evolving in the last decade of the seventh century. Moreover, much of what we know as Islam ? the lives and sayings of the Prophet ? is based on texts from between 130 and 300 years after Muhammad’s death.

In 1977 two other scholars from the School for Oriental and African Studies at London University ? Patricia Crone (a professor of history at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton) and Michael Cook (a professor of Near Eastern history at Princeton University) ? suggested a radically new approach in their book Hagarism: The Making of the Islamic World.

Since there are no Arabic chronicles from the first century of Islam, the two looked at several non-Muslim, seventh-century accounts that suggested Muhammad was perceived not as the founder of a new religion but as a preacher in the Old Testament tradition, hailing the coming of a Messiah. Many of the early documents refer to the followers of Muhammad as "hagarenes," and the "tribe of Ishmael," in other words as descendants of Hagar, the servant girl that the Jewish patriarch Abraham used to father his son Ishmael.

In its earliest form, Ms. Crone and Mr. Cook argued, the followers of Muhammad may have seen themselves as retaking their place in the Holy Land alongside their Jewish cousins. (And many Jews appear to have welcomed the Arabs as liberators when they entered Jerusalem in 638.)

The idea that Jewish messianism animated the early followers of the Prophet is not widely accepted in the field, but "Hagarism" is credited with opening up the field. "Crone and Cook came up with some very interesting revisionist ideas," says Fred M. Donner of the University of Chicago and author of the recent book Narratives of Islamic Origins: The Beginnings of Islamic Historical Writing. "I think in trying to reconstruct what happened, they went off the deep end, but they were asking the right questions."

The revisionist school of early Islam has quietly picked up momentum in the last few years as historians began to apply rational standards of proof to this material.

Mr. Cook and Ms. Crone have revised some of their early hypotheses while sticking to others.

Mis-translated possibility:
Seventy-two dark-eyed virgins await in Paradise

"We were certainly wrong about quite a lot of things," Ms. Crone said. "But I stick to the basic point we made: that Islamic history did not arise as the classic tradition says it does."

Ms. Crone insists that the Koran and the Islamic tradition present a fundamental paradox. The Koran is a text soaked in monotheistic thinking, filled with stories and references to Abraham, Isaac, Joseph and Jesus, and yet the official history insists that Muhammad, an illiterate camel merchant, received the revelation in Mecca, a remote, sparsely populated part of Arabia, far from the centers of monotheistic thought, in an environment of idol-worshiping Arab Bedouins. Unless one accepts the idea of the angel Gabriel, Ms. Crone says, historians must somehow explain how all these monotheistic stories and ideas found their way into the Koran.

"There are only two possibilities," Ms. Crone said. "Either there had to be substantial numbers of Jews and Christians in Mecca or the Koran had to have been composed somewhere else."

Indeed, many scholars who are not revisionists agree that Islam must be placed back into the wider historical context of the religions of the Middle East rather than seeing it as the spontaneous product of the pristine Arabian desert. "I think there is increasing acceptance, even on the part of many Muslims, that Islam emerged out of the wider monotheistic soup of the Middle East," says Roy Mottahedeh, a professor of Islamic history at Harvard University.

Scholars like Mr. Luxenberg and Gerd- R. Puin, who teaches at Saarland University in Germany, have returned to the earliest known copies of the Koran in order to grasp what it says about the document’s origins and composition. Mr. Luxenberg explains these copies are written without vowels and diacritical dots that modern Arabic uses to make it clear what letter is intended. In the eighth and ninth centuries, more than a century after the death of Muhammad, Islamic commentators added diacritical marks to clear up the ambiguities of the text, giving precise meanings to passages based on what they considered to be their proper context. Mr. Luxenberg’s radical theory is that many of the text’s difficulties can be clarified when it is seen as closely related to Aramaic, the language group of most Middle Eastern Jews and Christians at the time.

For example, the famous passage about the virgins is based on the word hur, which is an adjective in the feminine plural meaning simply "white." Islamic tradition insists the term hur stands for "houri," which means virgin, but Mr. Luxenberg insists that this is a forced misreading of the text. In both ancient Aramaic and in at least one respected dictionary of early Arabic, hur means "white raisin."

Mr. Luxenberg has traced the passages dealing with paradise to a Christian text called Hymns of Paradise by a fourth-century author. Mr. Luxenberg said the word paradise was derived from the Aramaic word for garden and all the descriptions of paradise described it as a garden of flowing waters, abundant fruits and white raisins, a prized delicacy in the ancient Near East. In this context, white raisins, mentioned often as hur, Mr. Luxenberg said, makes more sense than a reward of sexual favors.

In many cases, the differences can be quite significant. Mr. Puin points out that in the early archaic copies of the Koran, it is impossible to distinguish between the words "to fight" and "to kill." In many cases, he said, Islamic exegetes added diacritical marks that yielded the harsher meaning, perhaps reflecting a period in which the Islamic Empire was often at war.

A return to the earliest Koran, Mr. Puin and others suggest, might lead to a more tolerant brand of Islam, as well as one that is more conscious of its close ties to both Judaism and Christianity.

"It is serious and exciting work," Ms. Crone said of Mr. Luxenberg’s work. Jane McAuliffe, a professor of Islamic studies at Georgetown University, has asked Mr. Luxenberg to contribute an essay to the Encyclopedia of the Koran, which she is editing.

Mr. Puin would love to see a "critical edition" of the Koran produced, one based on recent philological work, but, he says, "the word critical is misunderstood in the Islamic world ? it is seen as criticizing or attacking the text."

Some Muslim authors have begun to publish skeptical, revisionist work on the Koran as well. Several new volumes of revisionist scholarship, The Origins of the Koran, and The Quest for the Historical Muhammad, have been edited by a former Muslim who writes under the pen name Ibn Warraq. Mr. Warraq, who heads a group called the Institute for the Secularization of Islamic Society, makes no bones about having a political agenda.

The actual reward in paradise: White raisins

"Biblical scholarship has made people less dogmatic, more open," he said, "and I hope that happens to Muslim society as well."

But many Muslims find the tone and claims of revisionism offensive. "I think the broader implications of some of the revisionist scholarship is to say that the Koran is not an authentic book, that it was fabricated 150 years later," says Ebrahim Moosa, a professor of religious studies at Duke University, as well as a Muslim cleric whose liberal theological leanings earned him the animosity of fundamentalists in South Africa, which he left after his house was firebombed.

Andrew Rippin, an Islamicist at the University of Victoria in British Columbia, Canada, says that freedom of speech in the Islamic world is more likely to evolve from within the Islamic interpretative tradition than from outside attacks on it. Approaches to the Koran that are now branded as heretical ? interpreting the text metaphorically rather than literally ? were widely practiced in mainstream Islam a thousand years ago.

"When I teach the history of the interpretation it is eye-opening to students the amount of independent thought and diversity of interpretation that existed in the early centuries of Islam," Mr. Rippin says. "It was only in more recent centuries that there was a need for limiting interpretation."

Scholars Scrutinize the Koran’s Origin