Organization of the Quran: Difference between revisions

Recently, some critical scholars such as Christoph Luxenberg and Gabriel Said Reynolds have postulated that the original core material of the Quran was Christian, used by Aramaic-speaking Christian missionaries, priests and laity. Luxenberg, in particular, believes that many of these surahs were, in fact, originally written in a literay dialect of Aramaic known as Syriac, and that this Syriac material was later Arabacized. Other surahs show Syriac influence, having been apparently composes in an Aramaic-Arabic "Mischsprache" or mixed-language. The particulars of Luxenberg's thesis have been torn apart by scholars since he published it, but the general idea that a Syriac "Qeryana" or lectionary was the core of the Quran has gained more respect in the scholarly community since that time. As such critical scholarship postulates that some of the surahs in the Quran may be very old indeed, perhaps older than Muhammad himself, while others may have been authored in the turbulent years following the death of the prophet and the Islamic civil wars which culminated in the rise of the Umayyad caliphate.