In March 2008, the newly-founded Inarah Institute for Research on Early Islamic History held a three-day international conference in Otzenhausen, Germany, on the early history of Islam and the Koran. The institute was founded by a group of German scholars inspired by the earth-shaking work of Christoph Luxenberg but concerned at the conspiracy of silence surrounding his work among traditional Islamologists; a silence hardly surprising given the implications of his insights for the traditional history of the Koran, now thought to be almost certainly false and fabricated many years after the foundation of Islam.

The March conference was a natural follow-up to a conference on Scripture and Skepticism held at the University of California, Davis, in January 2007. Many of the founders of Inarah, the organisers of the German conference, participated in the Davis Conference, and decided to hold a similar conference devoted entirely to the Koran and Early Islam, a conference that would fearlessly examine the origins of the Koran wherever the empirical research might lead.

Prometheus Books has agreed to publish works by Inarah, including the proceedings of the present conference. The first of these publications from Inarah, an English translation of Die Dunklen Anfänge, (The Hidden Origins of Islam) is due to appear this month.

The conference was made possible by the enthusiastic and prompt moral and financial support of Sam Harris, the author of "End of Faith", and his foundation “The Reason Project”, and the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science.

At the conference, Professor Johannes Thomas of the University of Paderborn pointed out that our sources for the conquest of Spain by Muslims are quite late and unreliable. There are no Arabic inscriptions dating back to the eighth century and only six dating back to the ninth. The earliest description in Arabic of the conquest of North Africa and Spain was written by Ibn Abd al-Hakam, an Egyptian who had never been to Spain and who is said to have written the text in the middle of the ninth century. As the Dutch Arabist Rienhart Dozy said, this account has no more historical value than the fairy tales in "The Book of the Thousand and One Nights". But as Professor Thomas pointed out, al-Hakam is not an exception, all other Arabian reports and compilations give us the same fairy tales. Leaning on the methodology established by Albrecht Noth, Thomas tries to sort out what really happened between the eighth and eleventh centuries in Spain.
Professor Helmut Waldmann of Tubingen gave a brief history of Zurvanism -a branch of Zoroastrianism that had the divinity Zurvan as its First Principle (primordial creator deity). In the second part of his talk, Waldmann gave a sketch of the influence of Zurvanism on Islam.

Filippo Rainieri described the historic roots of Shari’a, while Geneviève Gobillot of the University of Lyons revealed the astonishing similarities of Koranic theology to the thought of Lactantius [died c.320] an early Christian author, a Latin-speaking native of North Africa, who taught rhetoric in various cities of the Eastern Roman Empire, ending in Constantinople. His Divinae Institutiones ("Divine Institutions"), an early example of a systematic presentation of Christian thought, was probably written between 303 and 311.

Christoph Heger, convinced of the validity of Christoph Luxenberg and Volker Popp's thesis that early documents, inscriptions and coins that contain the terms "muhammad" and " 'ali" should not be understood as proper names of the putatively historical figures of Islamic historiography but as honorific titles of Jesus Christ, argued that confirmation of their thesis could be found in the old text of an inscription of a talisman in the possession of Tewfik Canaan. The text of the talisman should be read as:
"O healer, O God! Help from God and near victory and good tiding of the believers! O praised one [muhammad], O merciful one, O benefactor. There is no young man like the high one [ 'ali] and no sword like the two-edged sword of the high one. O God, O living one, O eternal one, O Lord of majesty and honour, O merciful one, O compassionate one".

This text should be understood as an invocation of Jesus Christ - the healer, the good tiding, the praised, merciful and high one, the young hero, "out of the mouth [of whom] went a sharp two-edged sword" [Apoc. 1:16], namely "the word of God ", which is "sharper than any two-edged sword" [Hebrews 4:12].

Dr. Markus Gross discussed the Buddhist influence on Islam and Professor Kropp explained the Ethiopian elements in the Koran. The independent scholar, traveler, and numismatist Volker Popp argued that Islamic history as recounted by Islamic historians has a Biblical structure – the first four caliphs are clearly modeled on Adam, Noah, Abraham, and Moses. The Muslim historians transformed historical facts to fit a Biblical pattern. Popp also developed a fascinating thesis that Islamic historians had a propensity to turn nomen (the names of the gens or clan) into patronyms. Thus Islamic historians had a tendency to take, for instance, Iranian names on inscriptions, turn them into Arabic-sounding names and then to turn historical events connected with the original Iranians into Islamic history. For example, Islamic history knows various so called Civil Wars. One of them was between Abd-al-Malik, his governor al-Hajjaj, and the rival caliph in Mecca by the name of Abdallah Zubair. But the evidence of inscriptions tells us that the name Zubair was actually ZNBYL, the title of the King of Kabulistan. His battle was with Abd-al-Malik of Merv which took place between 60 and 75 AE in the East of the former Sassanian domains. The historians transferred this feud to Mecca and Jerusalem and then embedded the whole into the structure of a well known story from the Old Testament, the secession of Omri and his building the Temple of Samaria.

Rainer Nabielek of Berlin provided evidence of a successful application of Luxenberg’s method not only to the Koran but to non-religious texts as well. This was convincingly shown by means of a hitherto unsolved medical term. This medical term can be traced back to Syriac in the same way as many Koranic expressions, as demonstrated by Luxenberg. In addition to this Nabielek pointed in his paper at the hitherto overlooked phenomenon of the existence of borrowed (loan) syntax in classical Arabic. His contribution confirms the validity of Luxenberg’s method in general.

Keith Small compared the textual variants in the New Testament manuscripts and Koranic manuscripts. Dr. Elisabeth Puin gave a lucid, and highly original analysis of an early Koran manuscript from Sana, Yemen, [DAM 01-27.1] in part written over a palimpsest Koranic text, summarizing her findings and their implications,

"… We must conclude that at the stage when and in the region where the manuscript was written those variants were not felt to be mistakes but conformed to a specific writing tradition."

Professor Van Reeth, already much impressed by Luxenberg's thesis and methodology, gave two talks at the conference. The shorter one compared the image of the pearl in four passages in the Koran that refer to a eucharistic prayer, and a parallel image found in the Eucharist of the Manichaeans. The longer talk discussed the similarities of the Islamic vision of the union of Muhammad with his God, and the commentary of Ephrem the Syrian on the union of the believer with God.

Ibn Warraq gave a brief account of the errors, fallacies, and contradictions in Edward Said's highly influential Orientalism.

Dr.Dšhla focused on Spain, and described the historical settings in which the two groups of Mozarabs (8th c. to 12th c.) and Moriscos (16th c.) had been living. These two groups used the Arabic script to write their Romance and Spanish texts. "This contact of two different systems offers the opportunity to find out more about the phonetic realisations of Vulgar-Arabic and the Romance language transcribed."

Dr Reynolds of the University of Notre Dame (U.S.A.) examined the meaning of the difficult term hanif, found in the Koran but clearly a non-Arabic word. It probably comes from the Syriac word hanpa, meaning pagan, but in the Koran it has a secondary Syriac meaning, of a clan (gens); ethnicity. In the Koran the term is almost always used in connection with Abraham, but in the sense of his ethnicity and never his religion.

Finally, Christoph Luxenberg himself gave an impressive talk that seemed to untie some difficult knots that several centuries of both Islamic and Western scholarship had been unable to undo. He gave an original explanation of the so-called mysterious letters with which some Surahs commence. At the beginning of twenty nine suras following the bismillah stands a letter, or a group of letters which are simply read as separate letters of the alphabet. Luxenberg suggested that they all had something to do with Syriac liturgical traditions. For instance, the letter sad at the beginning of Surah 38 indicates the number 90, referring to Psalm 90, while the letters A L R to be found at the beginning of Surahs 10, 11, 12, 14, 15 are a Syriac abbreviation meaning "The Lord said to me".

It is to be hoped that the publication of the proceedings of this conference together with the English translations of Die Dunklen Anfaenger and A Syriac Reading of the Koran, will lead to a far greater understanding of the problems surrounding the traditionally accepted history of early Islam and the Koran, both within the academic community and in the wider world.

Ibn Warraq is Senior Research Fellow at the Center for Enquiry