■ I promised not to fill this blog with blather about my recent travels, and I won’t, but I was interested to see that David Frum, in the course of writing about The Hunchback of Notre Dame, sums up my reaction to Paris:
It is very weird to think that the Paris of 1831 [the year of Hunchback’s publication] looked much more like Paris of 1482 – the year in which the novel is set – than the Paris of today.
There was of course no Eiffel Tower, no Grand Palais, no Pont Alexander III. There were no Belle Epoque apartment houses, no Metro signs, no Opera, no Haussman boulevards. The Arc de Triomphe was begun - but abandoned unfinished.
Ile de la Cite was still a jumble of ancient houses and shops. The area around the Beaubourg, the old marketplace, was still one of the most densely inhabited in the city. Montmartre was a semi-rustic village, covered with vineyards and windmills. The Tuileries marked the westward end of the built-up city, with the Champs Elysees a long suburban promenade spotted here and there by palaces new and old.
The city would change more in the next 175 years than it had in the previous350. . . .
It’s a very striking thought that a modern tourist can see much, much, much more of the scenes and surroundings of the American Revolution than of the French. The Bastille: gone. What was the National Assembly: gone. The Jacobins and the Cordeliers: gone. The prison in which Louis XVI was held: gone. The Champs de Mars: changed beyond all recognition.
You can stand where Patrick Henry gave his oration, visit old North Church, tour the hall in which the Constitution was written, and of course see the homes of Washington, Jefferson, Adams, Hamilton, Madison, and so many others. Let nobody talk of the European sense of history and American neglect!
■ I’m reminded, by his linking to one of my posts, that I ought to call attention to Nicholas Whyte’s series of reviews of works that have won both the Hugo and the Nebula. He is currently up to number 28 (Kelly Link’s “The Faery Handbag”) and has about 30 to go. It’s a worthwhile project, illustrating the breadth and vagaries of taste within the SF community, and Nicholas’ comments are readable and perceptive. In fact, he deserves a Best Fan Writer nomination for them.
As a completely separate interest, fantastical in its own way, Nicholas maintains a site devoted to election results in Northern Ireland from 1885 to the present.
■ Over the weekend, the Wall Street Journal carried a remarkable story about a new twist in Koranic studies [link may work only for subscribers].
Before World War II, German scholars compiled a huge photographic record of early manuscripts of Islam’s sacred book, with the aim of bringing modern scholarly methods to bear on the text. The effort ground to a halt under the Hitler regime, which had other priorities for men who knew Arabic. Then, on April 24, 1944, British bombers devastated the Bavarian Academy of Science, where the collection was housed. Its custodian, Anton Spitaler, reported that it had been destroyed.
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.
Since contemporary Moslem governments show little inclination to grant Western scholars access to documents, the rediscovered archive is a vital resource for Koranic studies. Not surprisingly, some Moslems feel threatened.
Modern approaches to textual analysis developed in the West are viewed in much of the Muslim world as irrelevant, at best. “Only the writings of a practicing Muslim are worthy of our attention,” a university professor in Saudi Arabia wrote in a 2003 book. “Muslim views on the Holy Book must remain firm: It is the Word of Allah, constant, immaculate, unalterable andinimitable.” . . .
In the early 1980s, when the archive was still thought to be lost, two German scholars traveled to Yemen to examine and help restore a cache of ancient Quran manuscripts. They, too, took pictures. When they tried to get them out of Yemen, authorities seized them, says Gerd-Rüdiger Puin, one of the scholars. German diplomats finally persuaded Yemen to release most of the photos, he says.
Mr. Puin says the manuscripts suggested to him that the Quran “didn’t just fall from heaven” but “has a history.” When he said so publicly a decade ago, it stirred rage. “Please ensure that these scholars are not given further access to the documents,” read one letter to the Yemen Times. “Allah, help us against our enemies.”
Berlin Quran expert Ms. Neuwirth, though widely regarded as respectful of Islamic tradition, got sideswiped by Arab suspicion of Western scholars. She was fired from a teaching post in Jordan, she says, for mentioning a radical revisionist scholar during a lecture in Germany.
For some perhaps fathomable reason, I suspect that there will never be much enthusiasm for finding layers of redaction in the Koran. The rediscovered archive is a valuable tool for scholarship, but tools are useless without the will to make use of them.
Quranic scholarship often focuses on arcane questions of philology and textual analysis. Experts nonetheless tend to tread warily, mindful of fury directed in recent years at people deemed to have blasphemed Islam’s founding document and the Prophet Muhammad.
If mere cartoons can give rise to murderous rage, what will happen when and if the Germans produce “the first ‘critical edition’ of the Quran – an attempt to divine what the original text looked like and to explore overlaps with the Bible and other Christian and Jewish literature”? It’s hard to be extremely optimistic.
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