What the Koran Really Says

This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. Find sources: "What the Koran Really Says" – news · newspapers · books · scholar · JSTOR (October 2009) (Learn how and when to remove this message)

What the Koran Really Says: Language, Text and Commentary

Author	Ibn Warraq
Language	English
Subject	Quran
Genre	Islamic history
Publisher	Prometheus Books
Publication date	October 2002
Publication place	United States
Media type	Print (Hardcover, Paperback), E-book
Pages	782
ISBN	978-1573929455
OCLC	633722447

What the Koran Really Says: Language, Text and Commentary (2002) is a book edited by Ibn Warraq and published by Prometheus Books.^[1] The book is a collection of classical essays, some translated for the first time, that provide commentary on the traditions and language of the Koran, discussing its grammatical and logical discontinuities, its Syriac and Hebrew foreign vocabulary, and its possible Christian, Coptic and Qumranic sources.^[1] The title is taken from German author Manfred Barthel's 1980 book Was wirklich in der Bibel steht ("What the Bible Really Says").^[1]

Within the book is an article written by Gerd R. Puin titled "Observations on Early Qu'ran Manuscripts in Sana'a". Professor Puin is a German scholar and an authority on Qur'anic historical orthography, the study and scholarly interpretation of ancient manuscripts, and a specialist in Arabic calligraphy. Professor Puin was the head of a restoration project, commissioned by the Yemeni government, which spent a significant amount of time examining the ancient Qur'anic manuscripts discovered in Sana'a, Yemen, in 1972. In an article in the 1999 Atlantic Monthly,^[2] Puin is quoted as saying that:

My idea is that the Koran is a kind of cocktail of texts that were not all understood even at the time of Muhammad. Many of them may even be a hundred years older than Islam itself. Even within the Islamic traditions there is a huge body of contradictory information, including a significant Christian substrate; one can derive a whole Islamic anti-history from them if one wants.

The Koran claims for itself that it is 'mubeen', or 'clear', but if you look at it, you will notice that every fifth sentence or so simply doesn't make sense. Many Muslims—and Orientalists—will tell you otherwise, of course, but the fact is that a fifth of the Koranic text is just incomprehensible. This is what has caused the traditional anxiety regarding translation. If the Koran is not comprehensible—if it can't even be understood in Arabic—then it's not translatable. People fear that. And since the Koran claims repeatedly to be clear but obviously is not—as even speakers of Arabic will tell you—there is a contradiction. Something else must be going on.^[2]