A Challenge To Islam For Reformation

Islam-The Straight Path is "a concise presentation of the history and spread of Islam and of the beliefs and obligations of Muslims as interpreted by some outstanding Muslim scholars of our time" from Turkey, Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Iran, Pakistan, Indonesia, and China. The essays present a vivid picture of this faith which exerts tremendous influence on its votaries and has found its home from Morocco to Indonesia and China. The work is not a comparative study but a portrayal of Islam as it is, with chapters devoted to subjects such as The Origin of Islam, Ideas and Movements in Islamic History, Islamic Beliefs and Code of Laws, The Rational and Mystical Interpretations of Islam, Shi'a, Islamic Culture in Arab and African Countries, Islamic Culture in Turkish Areas, Muslim culture in Pakistan and India, Islamic Culture in China, Islam in Indonesia and Unity in Diversity in Islam. Each chapter epitomizes a subject which could "scarcely be covered adequately in a whole book".

The coming about of an English translation of a reworked and updated version of the German book "Über den Urkoran" was not something to be taken for granted since the author himself had in the early eighties left the field of Islamic studies in general as well as of Koranic studies in particular as he thought: once and for ever. His turning away was on the one hand prompted by the, to take it with the greatest politeness, unfriendly attitude of the German reactionary (and anti-theological. as already the Nazis were) representatives of Islam scholarship towards the German liberal- theological school of dogma criticism of the nineteenth century whose tradition, the author continues - but almost completely alone. On the other hand there was the alluring high aim of being able to turn, after a long and highly informative detour into the matters of Near Eastern religious and linguistic history, even through the amazing history of pre- and early Islamic Arabia, to the concern of the author's first studies in the early fifties, that is, to the problems still to be solved for a conclusive historic picture of the earliest development of Hebrew and Israelite society and religion. Under these circumstances the achievement of an English version of the "Urkoran" was largely due to the worldwide symphathizers with the author's dogmacriticism who again and again admonished him to provide or at least to lend his hand to the provision of such an English edition. It seems appropriate to name here the well-known Dutch Islamicist and Arabist Gautier H.A. Juynboll, Grandson of the likewise well- known Dutch Islamicist and Arabist Theodor Willem Juynboll (1866-1945: who was a student of Michael Jan de Goeje 1836-1906). Gautier, according to his scholarly education in the wake of the classical tradition of European Islamistics, was in the beginning of the eighties the first (and seamingly only) colleague in the field trying, - while teaching at the University of Kent, to gather support among his peers for the idea of an English edition of the "Urkoran" to appear in England. His endeavour turned out to have been invested in vain - but not surprisingly if one remembers the ideas the predominant Anglophone revisionist Koran scholarship was heading for at that time (see here above p. XXXIV ). Since he was at that time also daring enough to publish remarks sympathetic to the theses of the author's Urkoran, it is also not surprising that contemporary West-European academia gave him the cold shoulder.

The original German version of this book already has a 30-year history. What lies behind the publication of this book was an almost unbelievable story of Western, predominantly German academic machinations to suppress or at least to hush up, undoubtedly with considerable success, the scholarly results brought forward and to deprive the author as far as possible of opportunities to pursue his scholarly work. The results of the author's. research in the Koran had turned out, - uninten- tionally, because the author originally intended a totally different outcome of his research (see here below note 13), to be a serious, even epochal challenge to traditional, Western and Islamic, conceptions of the Koran and Islam, a challenge which is now about to be made, despite of all impediments, also in English to the world at large. It is perhaps an auspicious overture to the third millennium, the first millennium of global communication and one much in need of spiritual convergence.

So, when these results are now presented in English to the English speaking world and thus also to the Islamic public, - German has never been widely familiar to Muslim people, it is fundamental to show that this book was and is principally due to a certain tradition of Central European self-criticism and, as far as such European self-criticism is lacking, to a criticism of Western spirit and behaviour vis à vis the rest of the world. Even the passing remarks of the famous French Islamicist Régis Blachère show (see here above) that this book is written in the wake of a specifically German, liberal dogma-critical approach to the problems of the future of mankind which has been almost entirely suppressed and extinguished early on in the twentieth century. This book attempts to revive this German liberal dogma-critical approach which was once famous throughout the world, but which throughout the last century was fiercely fought against even by reactionary German academia itself. The unremitting.