Panel revisits Quran's history

In a post-Sept. 11 America where debates about Islam are often fiery, professors reminded Penn that the "ivory tower" can remain above the fray. Friday, four professors calmly presented their widely differing theories about when and how the Quran was written. "Who Wrote Down the Quran?" -- part of the Humanities Forum's "Year of the Book" and co--sponsored by Penn's Middle East Center -- nearly filled a Wharton lecture hall to capacity with a mix of professors, students and community members. "Universities are where open and respectful conversations are supposed to occur," Associate Dean Walter Licht said, both welcoming the audience and setting the afternoon's cordial tone. Everett Rowson, a professor of Arabic and Islamic studies, introduced the topic by explaining the traditional Islamic beliefs. According to Rowson, it is believed in Islam that Muhammad received the revelations piecemeal. As Muhammad was preaching, Rowson explained, his followers were writing. These scattered "scraps of paper" were then collected and turned into book form 30 to 50 years after Muhammad's death, Rowson noted. But in contrast to this traditional view, Andrew Rippin, a history professor at the University of Victoria, argued that there is a difference between composition and canonization. While composition is the physical act of writing a book, canonization is a complex process whereby the book gains authority in a community. To him, canonization trumps the physical act of writing. If scholars date the Quran by canonization, it was completed three centuries after Muhammad's death, he argued. But the next presenter, Temple University professor Mahmoud Ayoub, began his analysis by rebutting Rippin's. Internal structural elements and language "present a fairly coherent picture of a book completed at the same time," he said. While Ayoub believed that the traditional view of the Quran's creation was fairly accurate, he emphasized the reciprocal relationship it had with the community. Turning from the social to the physical, Francois D‚roche, a professor at the Sorbonne, presented the audience with an array of slides featuring Quran fragments. He emphasized that the scribes of the Quran all worked in different ways and had a variety of choices to make in laying out the final form of the codex. The final presenter, University of Chicago professor Fred Donner, did not use slides to educate the audience -- instead, he used tales of homework mistakes. As a graduate student, he was doing his Syriac homework when he made a few seemingly insignificant errors. Those mistakes, however, led him to believe that some of the incongruous words in the Quran were transliterated Syriac. He explained that this led him to conclude that the Quran was written, recited and then rewritten. Patricia Crone, a professor at the Princeton-affiliated Institute for Advanced Study took the podium next and pointed out flaws in all of the presenters' works. Audience members then took center stage as they emotionally challenged the professors' conclusions, asking questions about what these findings mean for the faith. However, the panel dismissed such queries, explaining that the topic of the lecture was solely historical. "I thought it was very ambitious," third-year graduate student David Hollenberg said. "It was fairly representative of the field."

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