Religion: Who are the Metzger's and Ehrman's of Koranic Textual Scholarship?

Cool thing about being a blogger is that sometimes you post something that appears to have continuing interest. Around five years ago, I attended a lecture on Islam given by Jay Smith and I posted a summary and periodically someone will comment.

Some recent activity in the comments section and my recent reading of Bart Ehrman's Misquoting Jesus and the 3rd Edition (borrowed from library) of Bruce Metzger's NT Text: Transmission, Corruption and Restoration (now in 4th edition) has caused me to do some googling about the topic of scholarship on textual criticism of the Koran.

Here are some items I found. I'll give the link and excerpt a few lines.

New York Times item from 2002.

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.
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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.
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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."
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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."
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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."
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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.
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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."

There was this item in the Lebanonwire.com ...

Moncef Ben Abdeljelil is a small academic, presently pinned between two large journalists. Back to the wall, he is ruminating on alternative readings of the Koran.
"Details I will leave to future study," says Abdeljelil. "But I think some of the different readings we find will affect the female condition, tolerance vis-a-vis Jews and Christians. Another will effect legislation ... "
He reaches for his pipe, then puts it back in the ashtray.
"This is the exciting thing about these alternative readings. We need to rethink the whole legal aspect of what can be drawn from the Koran. I believe this critical edition will enlarge our thinking about women’s condition, religious tolerance, what we call human rights."
A professor of literature and human science at Sousse University in Tunis, Abdeljelil heads a team of scholars compiling a critical edition of the Koran. The book will publish a number of alternative readings found in a collection of Koranic mashaf (mas-Haf, or manuscripts) some dating from the first Islamic century that had been stockpiled in the Grand Mosque in Sanaa and uncovered three decades ago.
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Abdeljelil speculates that, were his small team bolstered with more scholars, the edition could be published in as soon as 10 years. He is cautiously enthusiastic about the project. He has good reason to be cautious.
Since its revelation, the central scripture of the Muslim community has been kept outside history in a way that has no equivalent in the Christian tradition. The Old and New Testaments have been scrutinized by textual critics since the 19th century peeling back the several, often dissonant, voices from various eras that were cobbled together to form the Christian scripture.
For devout Muslims, treating the Koran in this manner is inconceivable. Where Christians generally concede that the Bible was written by men, the Koran is believed to have been handed down from God to the Prophet Mohammed, without human intervention, in Arabic perfect, immutable in message, language, style, and form. The oneness of the Koran stands as a metaphor for Islam’s conception of the oneness of God.
By applying the same techniques of textual criticism that have been used with the Bible, Abdeljelil and his colleagues are giving the Koran a history.
Abdeljelil is quick to note that this project is not the first of its kind European scholars have been looking at the Yemeni mashaf for years now. He would point out that within Islamic heritage there are different readings of the Koranic text. But the impact of the critical edition will be profound.
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The Luxenberg thesis is quite separate from Abdeljelil’s critical work on the Koran. Luxenberg worked not with old mashaf but the 1923 Egyptian edition of the Koran. The Tunisians are skeptical of Luxenberg’s conclusions but they support his method.
"As an approach we are not bothered by what Luxenberg has proposed, nor with his premise that there are languages that had an impact upon Arabic. In fact we would go so far as to encourage it."
Abdeljelil and his colleagues have problems with Luxenberg drawing conclusions drawn from the 1923 text rather than the mashaf.
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The scholars agree that their fiddling with the Koran will likely not be well received.
"The popular response will never be positive," says Abdeljelil. "Even if our project were done by true Muslims in a very Islamic country, people would never accept it because the popular imagination is manipulated by different trends. The massive number of population ... believe this text is a divine work that cannot be touched."
Abdeljelil advocates a sort of intellectual trickle-down theory of Koranic criticism.
"I think this project should first be initiated within academic circles. After that you could bring it to workshops, theses and dissertations. Then, after 10 or 15 years, you can bring it to a broader segment of society."

Here is a digest of The Origins of The Koran: Classic Essays on Islam's Holy Book, edited by Ibn Warraq (Prometheus Books: Amherst, New York. 1998)

That item is quite lengthy and I haven't yet plowed through it. There is more to be found with these items from Jay Smith with Muslim responses.

Thus, it would appear that there is the beginnings of scholarship investigating the Koran in a manner like Biblical text critical scholarship.

In the case of Biblical textual studies, the age of some of the Greek manuscripts, the number of them, their geographic distribution and remarkable consistency give text scholars the perspective that transmission though imperfect was pretty good. Also, encouraging was the comparison between the Hebrew Scriptures of the Dead Sea Scrolls (really ancient) and the Masoretic Texts (not as ancient) showing that the scribes were pretty good at their jobs.

It will be interesting to see to what extent Islamic scholarship is willing to put their documents through the same kind of analysis. This item from Rod Dreher reflects the uphill nature of such a quest.

P.J. Williams points to this item in the Boston Globe describing the work of producing the first ever critical edition of the Koran.

The work of text scholars is obscure and it takes some skill to make it accessible to the lay audience. Will there be that kind of effort made as the project continues? What will be the results of the project? What will be the reactions?