The following review by Chiu ChunLing, a reader and commenter at
Gates of Vienna, was done at my request. He is far more careful than I
would have been and for his scholarship I am both humbled and grateful.
We have amazing readers.
This book defies description but it is worth your time. The DO-NOT-TOUCH walls that fundamentalist Muslims have erected around the Koran are essentially the same as those which fundamentalist Christians build around Jewish and Christian scriptures. Despite their fears about the fragility of the texts, all such creations are worthy of examination.
In the process of our inspections and analyses we find out much about ourselves. I will continue to stand with Heisenberg on that one; his principle doesn’t hold just for physics but crosses all intellectual boundaries at some point.
Our thanks to Chiu ChunLing for his patience, too. One of us will post an excerpt at the Amazon page. (By the way, the few reviews on that page at present are all reasonable and also worth your while.)
*********************
In reviewing Norbert G. Pressburg’s book, “What the Modern Martyr Should Know: Seventy-Two Grapes and Not a Single Virgin: The New Picture of Islam”, I must begin by addressing a misconception that is likely to arise from the title.
This book defies description but it is worth your time. The DO-NOT-TOUCH walls that fundamentalist Muslims have erected around the Koran are essentially the same as those which fundamentalist Christians build around Jewish and Christian scriptures. Despite their fears about the fragility of the texts, all such creations are worthy of examination.
In the process of our inspections and analyses we find out much about ourselves. I will continue to stand with Heisenberg on that one; his principle doesn’t hold just for physics but crosses all intellectual boundaries at some point.
Our thanks to Chiu ChunLing for his patience, too. One of us will post an excerpt at the Amazon page. (By the way, the few reviews on that page at present are all reasonable and also worth your while.)
In reviewing Norbert G. Pressburg’s book, “What the Modern Martyr Should Know: Seventy-Two Grapes and Not a Single Virgin: The New Picture of Islam”, I must begin by addressing a misconception that is likely to arise from the title.
This is not a book intended for an audience of Muslims devout enough
to contemplate martyrdom. It might be better titled, “What the Modern
Christian Martyr Should Know: A Hundred and One Truths Certain to Enrage
Devout Muslims”, but the book is not particularly aimed at Christians
either (who in any case need no help finding ways to enrage Muslims).
The audience for Norbert G. Pressburg’s work is those who give primary
respect to the truth claims of empirically verifiable facts, and who
want an introduction to what the sciences of history and archeology
currently can tell us about the origins and history of Islam. It thus
ought to be titled, “The Historical Facts about Islam: What Muslims Kill
to Keep Hidden”, or some more imaginative title of the same intent.
As the revised sub-title suggests, it is not the sort of book you want to discuss with any Muslims you know (and certainly not with any that you don’t know). “Norbert G. Pressburg” is a pseudonym, an unfortunate necessity for this kind of book which says much about the nature of Koranic Islam. Although Pressburg’s focus is predominantly on what can be factually established about the past rather than direct criticism of the role of Islam in the modern world, the implications for Muslims today are inescapable.
Pressburg has done an admirable job of creating an accessible guide to the verifiable historical facts about Islam for the non-expert in Semitic languages, Middle Eastern archeology, and textual criticism of primary source documents. It will not make a non-expert into an expert, but it does provide an overview of the important information that science currently has uncovered on the subject and punctures a number of commonly circulated myths which cannot be confirmed or are definitely contrary to verifiable facts. Pressburg begins with the myth that the modern Koran represents a perfectly error-free transmission of a written Qur’an codified by Mohammad’s contemporaries to correspond exactly with the revelations taught by Mohammad. The book also covers a number of other myths important to the justification of Islamic supremacy.
One of the major problems for Islam is that the Koran is largely unintelligible even to those fluent in Arabic. Moreover this has always been the case, the problem is not any evolution of the Arabic language but that the language of the Qur’an is not really pure Arabic. The Qur’an contains vocabulary and usages from several different Semitic languages, Syro-Aramaic significant among them. Koranic authorities claim that the unintelligibility is the result of the divine revelation being too advanced for the uninitiated to understand, which superficially makes sense if the Qur’an were really God’s final word on everything. It is a generally observed inevitability that the more highly literate and densely informative any fixed communication is, the more difficulty there is going to be in deciphering the contents. This is not just true of natural language, it is a scientifically established aspect of information theory itself, the more complex the message, and the higher the degree of compression, the more it will look like noise to those without the key to deciphering it.
But there are two logical consequences of this. Anyone familiar with how much more dramatically information corruption affects a highly compressed data format will realize that even minor errors in information-dense media can lead to major deviations from intended results. A high density of information not only precludes the degree of redundancy that is necessary for easy decoding, that same lack of redundancy means that even small errors in transmission result in large errors in the result of otherwise correct decoding methods.
If the Koran is claimed to be this sort of message, then the exact wording of the Qur’an must be preserved to avoid changing the message dramatically. The second consequence is that an inability to detect the presence of such errors indicates that the decoding method being used is incorrect, because robust error detection is an absolute requirement of dealing with high-density information. If the Koran is not a perfect transmission of the Qur’an (that being a perfect transcription and codification of Mohammad’s teachings), or if the Koranic authorities are demonstrably incompetent to detect errors in their interpretation, then the reliability of the message is destroyed. Pressburg provides abundant evidence that thoroughly demolishes both propositions necessary to the validity of the Koran.
The fact that sections of the Qur’an are reflective of earlier Christian apocrypha and devotional liturgies should not really surprise anyone familiar with the claims of Islamic tradition to continuity with and extension of existing Judeo-Christian belief and revelation…
Continue reading
As the revised sub-title suggests, it is not the sort of book you want to discuss with any Muslims you know (and certainly not with any that you don’t know). “Norbert G. Pressburg” is a pseudonym, an unfortunate necessity for this kind of book which says much about the nature of Koranic Islam. Although Pressburg’s focus is predominantly on what can be factually established about the past rather than direct criticism of the role of Islam in the modern world, the implications for Muslims today are inescapable.
Pressburg has done an admirable job of creating an accessible guide to the verifiable historical facts about Islam for the non-expert in Semitic languages, Middle Eastern archeology, and textual criticism of primary source documents. It will not make a non-expert into an expert, but it does provide an overview of the important information that science currently has uncovered on the subject and punctures a number of commonly circulated myths which cannot be confirmed or are definitely contrary to verifiable facts. Pressburg begins with the myth that the modern Koran represents a perfectly error-free transmission of a written Qur’an codified by Mohammad’s contemporaries to correspond exactly with the revelations taught by Mohammad. The book also covers a number of other myths important to the justification of Islamic supremacy.
One of the major problems for Islam is that the Koran is largely unintelligible even to those fluent in Arabic. Moreover this has always been the case, the problem is not any evolution of the Arabic language but that the language of the Qur’an is not really pure Arabic. The Qur’an contains vocabulary and usages from several different Semitic languages, Syro-Aramaic significant among them. Koranic authorities claim that the unintelligibility is the result of the divine revelation being too advanced for the uninitiated to understand, which superficially makes sense if the Qur’an were really God’s final word on everything. It is a generally observed inevitability that the more highly literate and densely informative any fixed communication is, the more difficulty there is going to be in deciphering the contents. This is not just true of natural language, it is a scientifically established aspect of information theory itself, the more complex the message, and the higher the degree of compression, the more it will look like noise to those without the key to deciphering it.
But there are two logical consequences of this. Anyone familiar with how much more dramatically information corruption affects a highly compressed data format will realize that even minor errors in information-dense media can lead to major deviations from intended results. A high density of information not only precludes the degree of redundancy that is necessary for easy decoding, that same lack of redundancy means that even small errors in transmission result in large errors in the result of otherwise correct decoding methods.
If the Koran is claimed to be this sort of message, then the exact wording of the Qur’an must be preserved to avoid changing the message dramatically. The second consequence is that an inability to detect the presence of such errors indicates that the decoding method being used is incorrect, because robust error detection is an absolute requirement of dealing with high-density information. If the Koran is not a perfect transmission of the Qur’an (that being a perfect transcription and codification of Mohammad’s teachings), or if the Koranic authorities are demonstrably incompetent to detect errors in their interpretation, then the reliability of the message is destroyed. Pressburg provides abundant evidence that thoroughly demolishes both propositions necessary to the validity of the Koran.
The fact that sections of the Qur’an are reflective of earlier Christian apocrypha and devotional liturgies should not really surprise anyone familiar with the claims of Islamic tradition to continuity with and extension of existing Judeo-Christian belief and revelation…
Continue reading
