The book received considerable attention from the popular press in North America and Europe at its release, perhaps in large part to its argument that the Quranic term Houri refers not to beautiful virgins in paradise (Jannah), but to grapes there.
Luxenberg's analysis suggests that the prevalent Syro-Aramaic language up to the seventh century formed a stronger etymological basis for its meaning.
Namely, in the framework of this study an examination of a series of hadith (sayings of the Prophet) has identified Aramaisms that had either been misinterpreted or were inexplicable from the point of view of Arabic.
But if we take the Syro-Aramaic root ܡܟ (mk, actually makk) (lower, to be low) as a basis, we get the adjective ܡܟܐ (makka) (masc.
[4][5]A notable trait of early written Arabic was that it lacked vowel signs and diacritics which would later distinguish, for example, ب, ت, ن, ي, and thus was prone to mispronunciation.
However, the assumption behind their endeavours has always been, according to him, that any difficult passage is true, meaningful, and pure Arabic, and that it can be deciphered with the tools of traditional Muslim scholarship.
For more than a millennium Aramaic was the lingua franca in the entire Middle Eastern region before being gradually displaced by Arabic beginning in the 7th century.
They pressed on toward distant territories, all the way to the borders of China and the western coast of India, in addition to the entire Arabian peninsula all the way to Yemen and Ethiopia.
But in an era in which Arabic was just an assembly of dialects and had no written form, the missionaries had no choice but to resort to their own literary language and their own culture; that is, to Syro-Aramaic.
Luxenberg cites the suggestion by Theodor Nöldeke "that the term Qorān is not an inner-Arabic development out of the synonymous infinitive, but a borrowing from that Syriac word with a simultaneous assimilation of the type fuʿlān.
"[10] The word houri, universally[citation needed] interpreted by scholars as "white-eyed virgins"[dubious – discuss] (who will serve the faithful in Paradise; Qur'an 44:54, 52:20, 55:72, 56:22) means, according to Luxenberg, "white grapes" or "raisins".
[citation needed] The verse 37:103, considered to be about Ibrahim's sacrifice of his son, reads when translated into English from Arabic, "And when they had both submitted and he put him down upon his forehead".
[...] Luxenberg's main problem, however, is that his line of reasoning doesn't follow the simple and strict method that he set out at the beginning of his book.
"[30] Conclusive remarks about the book are expressed as "certainly not everything Luxenberg writes is nonsense or too far-fetched, but quite a few of his theories are doubtful and motivated too much by a Christian apologetic agenda.
So, for example, the virgins who are supposedly awaiting good Islamic martyrs as their reward in paradise are in reality "white raisins" of crystal clarity rather than fair maidens.
"[31] In 2002, The Guardian newspaper published an article which stated: Luxenberg tries to show that many obscurities of the Koran disappear if we read certain words as being Syriac and not Arabic.
Luxenberg 's new analysis, leaning on the Hymns of Ephrem the Syrian, yields "white raisins" of "crystal clarity" rather than doe-eyed, and ever willing virgins—the houris.
[32]In 2003, the Pakistani government banned a 2003 issue of Newsweek's international edition discussing Luxenberg's thesis on grounds that it was offensive to Islam.
An article published in the New York Times on 2nd March 2002 (and subsequently broadly disseminated in the internet) referred to this book as the work of 'Christoph Luxenberg, a scholar of ancient Semitic languages in Germany'.
It is thus not a question of some intrepid philologist, pouring over dusty books in obscure languages somewhere in the provinces of Germany and then having to publish his results under a pseudonym so as to avoid the death threats of rabid Muslim extremists, in short an ivory-tower Rushdie.
"[9]: 51 He adds that according to Luxenberg, for the last two hundred years, Western scholars "have totally misread the Qur'ān" and that, ad hominem, no one can understand the Qur'an as "Only he can fret out for us the Syrian skeleton of this text.
"[9]: 56 Summing up his assessment of Luxenberg's method, he states: The first fundamental premise of his approach, that the Qur'ān is a Syriac text, is the easiest to refute on linguistic evidence.
In fact, his investigations should be done again, taking into account all the scholarly work that Luxenberg doesn't seem to know" and mentions that he is "unaware of much of the other literature on the subject" and that "quite a few of his theories are doubtful and motivated too much by a Christian apologetic agenda.
"[37] Patricia Crone, professor of Islamic history at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, in a 2008 article at opendemocracy.net admitted that the Quran language is obscure and that "Sometimes it uses expressions that were unknown even to the earliest exegetes, or words that do not seem to fit entirely, though they can be made to fit more or less; sometimes it seems to give us fragments detached from a long-lost context; and the style is highly allusive."
[38] In contrast to these commentaries, Robert Phenix and Cornelia Horn of the University of St Thomas in Saint Paul, Minnesota write: It is hoped that an English translation of this work will soon appear.
Despite the sober revolution this book will no doubt create, one should not be naïve to think that all Islamicists in the West will immediately take up and respond to the scholarly challenges posed by any work of this kind.
However, just as Christianity faced the challenges of nineteenth and twentieth century biblical and liturgical scholarship, so too will serious scholars of Islam, both East and West, benefit from the discipline Luxenberg has launched.