The writers of The Great Secret of Islam and The Three Faces of the Qur’ān present a view that runs contrary to the Islamic narrative and tradition. The Three Faces of the Qur’ān was authored by Leila Qadr and Arūn Amīn Sa‘d al-Dīn, and The Great Secret of Islam[1] by ‘Olaf’, the nom de plume of Odon Lafontaine who has generally presented himself as a consultant, a journalist, a blogger and a history buff. His interpretive and theological work on the Qur’ān and the historical origins of Islam is based on the work The Hidden History of Islam by Father Édouard-Marie Gallez.
BY JADOU JIBRIL
ÉDOUARD MARIE GALLEZ, born 1957, is a French Christian theologian, a member of the Order of Saint-Jean, who holds a doctorate in Theology and the History of Religions from the University of Strasbourg in 2004. The subject of his dissertation, which was supervised by Roland Menrath, relates to the relationship between the origins of Islam in Judaism, and its derivation from it.
The work The Three Faces of the Qur’ān [2] by Leila Qadr and Arūn Amīn Sa‘d al-Dīn is primarily a response to Muslim apologists’ claims as to the uniqueness of the Qur’an, a uniqueness which is unprecedented and unparalleled in the history of religions. The work combines the latest research into Qur’ānic sources, and brings together a prodigious number of works on philology, archaeology, scriptures, Qur’ānic sciences, and the religious historical phenomenology.
It is constructed on the idea that it is only by a contextualization of the texts, the intersection of studies and the convergence of scholarly disciplines that a coherent perception of the true origins of Islam’s Text can be conceived and its true nature demonstrated. The research concludes that the Qur’ān is a series of fused, revised, and paraphrased texts deriving their form and inspiration from earlier works tracing their origins in the Bible, the Talmud and the Midrash. Indeed, it goes on to conclude that behind the Qur’ān we discover by implication the true ‘Mother of the Book’ – the Bible, the scripture which the Qur’ān constantly refers back to.
The Bible and the Apocrypha served as the foundation and the matrix, and liberally furnished the materials for the new Apocrypha in Arabic – the early Qur’ān – its grammatical structure, its parables, and its religious teachings. But we also find strong echoes in these of early Eastern Christianity. A third of the Qur’ān’s original substructure is considered to be composed of Christian hymns. The Three Faces of the Qur’ān presents a set of hypotheses to explain this strong presence of pre-Islamic Biblical and ritual texts. It refers either to the existence of earlier texts shared in common by two religious communities of the time, the Nazarene Jews and the early Muslim sects, or points to the direct influence of Christian and Nazarene Judaism on the societies of primitive Islam.[3] In particular, it traces the emergence of Biblical borrowings and tropes in societies characterised by a Holy Book when a charismatic leader emerges leading an eschatological religious campaign on the imminence of The Hour, the end of the world.
A third of the Qur’ān’s original substructure is considered to be composed of Christian hymns
The book sought to clarify the complex, collating and mythological nature of the Qur’ānic text. It claims to uncover the various layers of the composition of the Qur’ān over the centuries, and the high degree of re-ordering and reinterpretation of the oral traditions, and apocryphal Christian and Midrashic texts, and the entire Syriac preaching literature from the sixth and seventh centuries. It points to the extensive compositional work over a period spanning more than 80 years that formed the ‘second layer’ of the Qur’ānic text. It also traces the intensive ‘interpretation’ work carried out in the Abbasid period which was responsible for furnishing a specific and special meaning to the Qur’ānic text after the period of its compilation (the ‘third layer’ of the Qur’ānic text).
The book confirms that the ‘second layer’ of the Qur’ān was crystallized following Muḥammad’s death and had ideological, historical, tribal, and political motives. The addition of ‘commentaries’ during the Abbasid Caliphate two centuries later put the final touches to this transformation of the original collection. It is thus apparent that the nature of the Qur’ānic text is contradictory and ultimately subject to the process of building an earthly temporal authority founded upon a heavenly legitimacy, one that has been strongly and sustainably tied to it to this day. Such a trajectory was not without its problems and serious difficulties caused by this spiritual and divine claim.
The Qur’ānic text was thus ultimately determined by the constant requirement to justify the desires and positions of those in power and consolidate their legitimacy in every period and place. This often led to political violence in the civil wars that were a constant feature of the early history of Islam.
Suggested Reading
Generally speaking it would seem that these two scholars, inspired by Fr. Édouard Marie Gallez, aimed to reapply the work of the commentators from the schools, for example, of historical and textual criticism of the texts of the New Testament. They seek to identify – or uncover – the different layers of the Qur’ānic text and the different editions of the Qur’ān, through the application of historiographic and linguistic methodologies.
Finally, they seek to reveal the stamp of a historical hoax, in that many elements of the Qur’ān, or the events narrated, seem to have been falsified at the instigation of some caliphs or for other reasons. It is also interesting that scholars present Muḥammad not as an emissary of a new calling, but as one of the many preachers of a period obsessed by the nearness of The Hour and the announcement of Jesus’ return, which was supposed to be imminent.
Thus, the idea of the superiority of Muslims over non-Muslims would appear to be an invented concept post-dating the era of Muḥammad. This is enshrined in ideas such as that of the Qur’ān coming to perfect the previous books,[4] and therefore constituting their most complete and correct form and therefore superior to them, or that Islam stands superior to all the religions that preceded it as the best and the highest of them and, ultimately, that Muslims are the finest of human beings.[5]
[1] Olaf’s work The Great Secret of Islam is available in French in the Almuslih Library here.
[2] The second part of this work, focusing on the origins of the Islamic scriptures, is available in French in the Almuslih Library here.
[3] In 2005 Édouard Marie Gallez published Le Messie et son Prophète – Aux origines de l’Islam (Christ and His Prophet – on the Origins of Islam) (in two volumes, from his doctoral dissertation). In this work he presents his theory that the Nazarene Jews could stand at the origins of early Islamic history and in particular as the authors of the texts that were later incorporated into the Qur’ān. In 2008 Gallez published an article on this: “Gens du Livre” et Nazaréens dans le Coran (‘The People of the Book and the Nazarenes in the Qur’ān’) which is available in the Almuslih Library here. An extract from his work Le Messie et son Prophète – Aux origines de l’Islam which deals with the origins of the Islamic shahāda: La Shahadah islamique primitive (‘The earliest Islamic shahāda’) is also vailable in the Almuslih Library here. In 2012 Gallez published Le Malentendu islamo-chrétien (The Islamic-Christian misunderstanding) in which he critiques the current Catholic-Islamic dialogue and its acquiescence to Islam’s suppression of its own history, and relates the historical origin of Islam in the Jewish Nazarean doctrines. (Ed.)
[4] Cf. the Qur’ānic passage [Qur’ān V, 48]: And We have revealed to you the Book with the truth, verifying what is before it of the Book and a guardian over it (Ed.)
[5] Cf. the Qur’ānic passage [Qur’ān III, 110]: You are the best community raised for the good of mankind ( (كُنْتُمْ خَيْرَ أُمَّةٍ أُخْرِجَتْ لِلنَّاسِ (Ed.)
