The Koran

I know that writing about the Koran can be dangerous for one's health, but here goes anyway. I have recently been working on my talk about the development of the Hebrew Bible using modern textual analysis or exegesis. This approach, known as "the Documentary Hypothesis" has shed important light on the origins and evolution of the Five Books of Moses. I wondered if a similar approach had been taken to the Koran. In fact there is a new, modern approach by some European scholars to the Koran that similarly sheds light on its possible origins and evolution.
There are two German experts, one of whom goes by a pseudonym to protect his identity and his life. He is known as Cristoph Luxenberg, and has been writing books and papers for some years that propose the novel concept of reading the Koran in Syrio-Aramaic rather than Arabic. It is clear that the writer or writers of the Koran were heavily influenced by Judaism and Christianity, and around the time of Mohammed and thereafter the main language spoken throughout the Middle East was Aramaic, a Semitic language similar to Hebrew and Arabic. The conventional reading of the Koran in Arabic, according to Luxenburg, is wrong and it should be read in Aramaic or more specifically Syrio-Aramaic. There are still a small number of Christians in Syria who speak and pray in that language.
An amazingly large proportion of the Koran, ranging form 20-50% cannot be readily understood in Arabic, notwithstanding the fact that it's author (supposedly God speaking thru Mohammed) says that its meaning is "crystal clear." By reading these segments in Syrio-Aramaic, Luxenberg contends that he can clarify most of what has not been clear in the Koran. He also comes up with some interesting alternative meanings, instead of the Arabic meaning that a martyr (shahid) will receive "72 virgins" in heaven, in Syrio-Aramaic this re-translates as "72 white grapes"! Apparently white grapes have a symbolic role in Syrio-Aramaic Christianity.
The other German is Gerd Puin, a foremost German scholar on the early Koran. He was commissioned by the Yemen Govt. to restore and decipher a hoard of old Koranic documents dating from the 8th-10th centuries discovered between walls in an ancient Mosque in Sana'a in 1972. He managed to separate and decipher them, and found some very intreresting results, for example: 1. The older versions of the documents contained many variants different from the canonical Koran; 2. Several of the documents have been written over (a palimpsest) as if the words/meaning were being deliberately changed; 3. Some of the pages contain drawings of buildings for decoration, something unheard of in later versions of the Koran.
These only go to show that, like the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament, the Koran is clearly not the unabridged word of God, but has a complex edited history. This was discussed by Sean Gannon in an article in the Jeruslaem Post on Dec 5, 2008, entitled "The Gospel Truth." He is an Irish journalist and expert on the Middle East and its ancient literature, and he refers to the work of the British scholars of the School of Oriental and African Studies, the late John Wansborough and his former students Patricia Crone and Michael Cook who have written articles and books expressing these views, such as "The making of the Islamic world." In this it is speculated that the Koran was in fact largely written after the Arab expansion and conquest began as a result of their contact with Jewish and Christian sources, rather than as a precursor to it, as now generally believed.