Over it
are neither nineteen nor seventeen
An especially meritorious
reconstruction
by Günter
Lüling, A Challenge to Islam for Reformation. The
Rediscovery and
Reliable Reconstruction of a Comprehensive Pre-Islamic Christian Hymnal
hidden
in the Koran under the Earliest Islamic Reinterpretation, Delhi,
Motilal
Banarsidass Publishers, 2003 (ISNB: 81-208-1952-7), a translation and
considerable reworking of the Günter Lüling, Über den Ur-Koran,
Erlangen 11974,
21993, is surah
74:30:
عَلَيْهَا
تِسَةَ
عَشَرَ, `alayhâ
tis`ata `ašara,
which is translated
verbatim:
"Above it (are) nineteen."
As is well-known, this verse has
been the origin of a lot of numerological phantasies concerning some
magic
behind the Koran.
The current Islamic understanding
says that the verse (“ayah”) refers to 19 angels guarding the
gates to
hell.
After all, this understanding of
verse 74:30 admittedly is stipulated by verse
74:31:
“And
We have set none but angels as guardians of the Fire; and We have fixed
their
number only as a trial for Unbelievers, in order that the People of the
Book
may arrive at certainty, and the Believers may increase in Faith, and
that no
doubts may be left for the People of the Book and the Believers, and
that those
in whose hearts is a disease and the Unbelievers may say, 'What symbol
doth
Allah intend by this?' Thus doth Allah leave to stray whom He pleaseth;
and
guide whom He pleaseth; and none can know the forces of thy Lord,
except He.
And this is no other than a warning to mankind.”
It is however common view of
Islamic and orientalist scholarship that verse 74:31 was
inserted/revealed
later. Indeed, already its enormous length in comparison with the
verses of its
context is striking. Verse 74:31 obviously was thought as kind of
comment or
admonition to cling exactly on to this understanding that "above it
(are)
19" means: 19 angels guarding the hell.
If we duly discard this
understanding forced upon verse 74:30, how might we understand it?
Nineteen
what? We are to answer this question in two steps.
Firstly, instead of the usually
given Arabic text "`alayhâ tis`ata `ašara" Muslim tradition
knows also the version
عَلَيْهَا
سَبْعَةَ
عَشَرَ, `alayhâ sab`ata `ašara,
"Above it (are) seventeen."
(Ibn
Hišam, Kitâb sîrat rasûli llâh, ed. Ferdinand
Wuestenfeld,
Goettingen 1860, reprint Frankfurt/Main 1961, II, 67, 4-16). These two
Arabic
figures, 17 and 19, even if written in words, are actually
indistinguishable if
the writer wrote, as usual, the "water waves" of the Arabic script
with equal spaces and didn't set the diacritical point or the two
diacritical
points, resp., at the crucial places.
Referring to 17 angels guarding the
gates to hell, of course, is nothing better than to 19 ones.
Secondly, Lüling proposed to read:
عَلَيْهَا
سَبْعَةَ
أَشْعُرٍ, `alayhâ sab`atu aš`urin,
an emendation which presupposes in
the rasm (= script apart from diacritical points and vowel
marks, which
are later inventions) the metathesis of the "ش,
š" (šîn) with the "ع, `"
(`ain) and an additional "ا, '" (alif)
in front of the rasm "š-`-r".
Such metatheses are rather common
in
Semitic etymology, and due to the structure of the Arabic script it is
even no
big affair to interchange a "س, s"
(sîn) with an "ع, `" (`ain) – or in a
script without diacritical
points a "ش, š" (šîn)
with an "ع,
`" (`ain).
For this reading "aš`urin",
including the additional alif, we have documental evidence:
Some of the
oldest Qur'an codices read "tis`ata a`šurin" (Arthur Jeffery, Materials for
the
History of the Text of the Qur'an. The Old Codices,
Already in the 9th century AD, when
Islamic orthodoxy consolidated, Muslim scholarship did not know what to
make of
this reading. Abû Hâti
as-Sijistânî
(+ 864) e.g. is reported (G.
Bergstraesser, Nichtkanonische Koranlesarten im MuHtasab
des Ibn Ginnî, Muenchen
1933, p. 73,5ff) to
have said about this odd variant: "It makes no recognizable sense
except
that 'tis`ata a`šurin' could mean the plural of 'ten' [i.e. a`šurin
in a nonsensical way understood as plural of `ašr/`ašarah,
leading to "nine tens" = 90; Ch.H.] or something else apart from what
just occurred to our minds."
In addition one may remember that
"Brother Mark" in his "A
`Perfect' Qur'an …" has shown that in the oldest Koran manuscripts
with their older orthography more alifs were present, which
later were
omitted in many cases.
Whereas a plural "a`šur"
of "`ašara" – like "tens" of "ten" –
certainly is nonsense, a plural "as`
Eventually we arrive at the
reconstruction of surah
74:30 as
عَلَيْهَا
سَبْعَةَ
أَسْعُرٍ, `alayhâ sab`atu as`urin,
"To it (are)
seven
gates."
The assertion that hell has seven
gates or bolts is very apt to the context of surah 74:30. And this
topic of
hell having seven gates is not only a very familiar one from Old-Orient
times,
but is present also in the Qur'an, namely in surah
15:44:
لَهَا
سَبَةَ
أَبْوَابٍ, lahâ sab`atu abwâbin,
"To it (are)
seven
gates."
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