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.
You can read the rest of the article at the following link.
The Virgins and the Grapes: the Christian Origins of the Koran
Interesting article. I was aware that Islam is a heresy of Christianity, but didn’t know many of the details.
On the linguistic side....
Aramaic comes from the Nothwest Semitic branch, if I remember right, and Arabic comes from the Central Semitic branch. Christ’s last words, “Abba, abba, lema sabachthani?” are Aramaic for the phrase we all know as “Father, father, why have you forsaken me?” Abba = father; in Arabic, ab means father. Lema = why; in Arabic, limatha. The -ni on the end of sabachthani refers to “me”; the same ending is used in Arabic.
The Hebrew (and Aramaic) amen means “I believe”; in Arabic, amanu (although the -u ending on verbs usually isn’t pronounced except in formal situations).
ISBN-10: 3-89930-088-2
ISBN-13: 978-3-89930-088-8
http://www.verlag-hans-schiler.de/index.php?title=Christoph+Luxenberg+The+Syro-Aramaic+Reading+of+the+Koran&art_no=M0088
and a new hardcover edition due in April:
Publisher: Prometheus Books (April 2009)
# Language: English
# ISBN-10: 1591027101
# ISBN-13: 978-1591027102
http://www.amazon.com/Syro-Aramaic-Reading-Koran-Contribution-Decoding/dp/1591027101