“This would radically alter the edifice of Islamic tradition and the history of the rise of Islam in late Near Eastern antiquity would have to be completely revised, somehow accounting for another book of scripture coming into existence 50 to 100 years before, and then also explaining how this was co-opted into what became the entity of Islam by around AD700.”
Posted the following article to FR, back in July 2004. It is a worthy read and bears out this discovery. From the link:
ROMA - That Aramaic was the lingua franca of a vast area of the ancient Middle East is a notion that is by now amply noted by a vast public, thanks to Mel Gibson´s film "The Passion of the Christ," which everyone watches in that language.But that Syro-Aramaic was also the root of the Koran, and of the Koran of a primitive Christian system, is a more specialized notion, an almost clandestine one. And it´s more than a little dangerous. The author of the most important book on the subject - a German professor of ancient Semitic and Arabic languages - preferred, out of prudence, to write under the pseudonym of Christoph Luxenberg. A few years ago, one of his colleagues at the University of Nablus in Palestine, Suliman Bashear, was thrown out of the window by his scandalized Muslim students.
In the Europe of the 16th and 17th centuries, mangled by the wars of religion, scholars of the Bible also used to keep a safe distance with pseudonyms. But if, now, the ones doing so are the scholars of the Koran, this is a sign that, for the Muslim holy book as well, the era of historical, linguistic, and philological re-readings has begun.This is a promising beginning for many reasons. Gerd-Rüdiger Puin, a professor at Saarland University in Germany and another Koran scholar on the philological level, maintains that this type of approach to Islam´s holy book can help to defeat its fundamentalist and Manichean readings, and to bring into a better light its ties with Judaism and Christianity.
The book by "Christoph Luxenberg" came out in 2000 in Germany with the title "Die Syro-Aramäische Lesart des Koran" ("A Syro-Aramaic Reading of the Koran"), published in Berlin by Das Arabische Buch. It is out of print, and there are no translations in other languages. But a new, updated edition (again in German) is about to arrive in bookstores.Here follows an interview with the author, published in Germany in the newspaper "Süddeutsche Zeitung" and in Italy in "L´espresso," no. 11, March 12-18, 2004: The Virgins and the Grapes: the Christian Origins of the Koran
Ping!
Update:
World’s Oldest Quran Supports Claim That Muhammad Changed Text Already in Existence
There are claims that these could be fragments from the very first complete version of the Koran, commissioned by Abu Bakr, a companion of the Prophet Muhammad - and that it is “the most important discovery ever for the Muslim world”.
Jamal bin Huwareib, managing director of the Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum Foundation, an education foundation set up by the ruler of the UAE, says the evidence points to an even more remarkable conclusion.
He believes the manuscript in Birmingham is part of the first comprehensive written version of the Koran assembled by Abu Bakr, the Muslim caliph who ruled between 632 and 634.
But don’t expect any end to the arguments over this ancient document.
http://www.bbc.com/news/business-35151643
Other threads about this:
‘Oldest’ Koran Fragments Found in Birmingham University
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/3315301/posts
The ‘Birmingham Koran’ fragment that could shake Islam after carbon-dating suggests it is OLDER than the Prophet Muhammad
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/3331622/posts