Saturday, January 12, 2008

Lost Quran archive in Germany

A facinating article in the WSJ about an archive of Quranic research that was thought lost for a long time, but has now been found, that shows that there were a lot of German nazis who'd been experts on Islam.
On the night of April 24, 1944, British air force bombers hammered a former Jesuit college here housing the Bavarian Academy of Science. The 16th-century building crumpled in the inferno. Among the treasures lost, later lamented Anton Spitaler, an Arabic scholar at the academy, was a unique photo archive of ancient manuscripts of the Quran.

The 450 rolls of film had been assembled before the war for a bold venture: a study of the evolution of the Quran, the text Muslims view as the verbatim transcript of God's word. The wartime destruction made the project "outright impossible," Mr. Spitaler wrote in the 1970s.

Mr. Spitaler was lying. The cache of photos survived, and he was sitting on it all along. The truth is only now dribbling out to scholars -- and a Quran research project buried for more than 60 years has risen from the grave.

"He pretended it disappeared. He wanted to be rid of it," says Angelika Neuwirth, a former pupil and protégée of the late Mr. Spitaler. Academics who worked with Mr. Spitaler, a powerful figure in postwar German scholarship who died in 2003, have been left guessing why he squirreled away the unusual trove for so long.

Ms. Neuwirth, a professor of Arabic studies at Berlin's Free University, now is overseeing a revival of the research. The project renews a grand tradition of German Quranic scholarship that was interrupted by the Third Reich. The Nazis purged Jewish experts on ancient Arabic texts and compelled Aryan colleagues to serve the war effort. Middle East scholars worked as intelligence officers, interrogators and linguists. Mr. Spitaler himself served, apparently as a translator, in the German-Arab Infantry Battalion 845, a unit of Arab volunteers to the Nazi cause, according to wartime records.

[...]

The Munich archive began with one of Mr. Nöldeke's protégés, Gotthelf Bergsträsser. As Germany slid towards fascism early last century, he hunted down old copies of the Quran in the Middle East, North Africa and Europe. He took photographs of them with a Leica camera.

In 1933, a few months after Hitler became chancellor, Mr. Bergsträsser, an experienced climber, died in the Bavarian Alps. His body was never given an autopsy; rumors spread of suicide or foul play.

His work was taken up by Otto Pretzl, another German Arabist. He too set off with a Leica. In a 1934 journey to Morocco, he wangled his way into a royal library containing an old copy of the Quran and won over initially suspicious clerics, he said in a handwritten report about his trip.

The Nazis began to use Arabists early in the war when German forces began pushing into regions with large Muslim populations, first North Africa and then the Soviet Union. Scholars were used to broadcast propaganda and to help set up mullah schools for Muslims recruited into the German armed forces.

Mr. Pretzl, the manuscript collector, appears to have worked largely in military intelligence. He interrogated Arabic-speaking soldiers captured in the invasion of France, then, according to some accounts, set off on a mission to stir up an Arab uprising against British troops in Iraq. His plane crashed.
So now, we have some very intriguing evidence of connections between Nazism and Islam. Read the whole thing in full.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

This article has me recall frequent reference to one using the pen name "Christoph Luxenberg".

As described by Hugh Fitzgerald:

"But no one had been so systematic, and meticulous, as Christoph Luxenberg, whose recent “Syro-Aramaic Reading” of the Qur’an. (“Die syro-Aramaische Lesart von der Koran”) can truly be described as a revolutionary study of the early Qur’an. And Luxenberg’s fearless philology has been extended to the study of other writings that have hitherto been too-easily accepted as purely Islamic in nature."


"Recent scholarship on the origins of Islam -- John Wansbrough, Patricia Crone, Michael Cook, Yehuda Nevo, Gerd Puin, Christoph Luxenburg et al.

and

"Does the Qur’an contain many passages that make sense only if given a “Syro-Aramaic reading”?

There is no impulse among Muslim scholars of Islam to have Islam examined, and studied, as Christianity and Judaism have been. Whether those studies of early Islam are philological (the line from Alphonse Mingana to Christoph Luxenberg), or historical (David Margoliouth, John Wansbrough, Michael Cook, Patricia Crone)"


Christoph's book is in print in english . . .but only for sale in Germany. Hmmmmm.

Could it be that Christoph is one of the surviving German/experts this article refers to?

Anonymous said...

Another telling feature in the article comes near the end:

"Mr. Kunitzsch, the obituary author, says he's mystified by Mr. Spitaler's motives. He speculates that his former colleague decided that the Quran manuscript project was simply too ambitious. The task, says Mr. Kunitzsch, grew steadily more sensitive as Muslim hostility towards Western scholars escalated, particularly after the founding of Israel in 1948. "He knew that for Arabs, [the Quran] was a closed matter."


Hence the current issues with MESA NOSTRA
http://www.jihadwatch.org/archives/004791.php

vp said...

Christoph's book is in print in english . . .but only for sale in Germany. Hmmmmm.

You can preview Christoph's book at Google Books. Here is the link.

Anonymous said...

"So now, we have some very intriguing evidence of connections between Nazism and Islam."

That complements the evidence of connections between Nazism and the Catholic church, and Nazism and the Lutheran church, don't you think?