Christianity is Revisionist Ethics, perfectly formed to convert Asiatics into fodder classes; it masquerades as a Revisionist Monotheism, which deflects all inquiry into its dynamics.
This normative learning configuration is progressing steadily Eastwards. Islam was the next hoax after the Titus affair. But why the Christian hoax was not sufficient to capture the Bedouin Arabs? Augustine inaugurated the middle ages with the doctrine of Divine Will. This was the key to taking out Persians, which Christianity could not do. Augustine was a Carthaginian Manichean.
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->http://eteraz.wordpress.com/2006/05/24/what-is-revisionist-islam/
Mr. Cook and Ms. Crone have revised some of their early hypotheses while sticking to others. "We were certainly wrong about quite a lot of things," Ms. Crone said. "But I stick to the basic point we made: that Islamic history did not arise as the classic tradition says it does."
Ms. Crone insists that the Koran and the Islamic tradition present a fundamental paradox. The Koran is a text soaked in monotheistic thinking, filled with stories and references to Abraham, Isaac, Joseph and Jesus, and yet the official history insists that Muhammad, an illiterate camel merchant, received the revelation in Mecca, a remote, sparsely populated part of Arabia, far from the centers of monotheistic thought, in an environment of idol-worshiping Arab Bedouins. Unless one accepts the idea of the angel Gabriel, Ms. Crone says, historians must somehow explain how all these monotheistic stories and ideas found their way into the Koran.
"There are only two possibilities," Ms. Crone said. "Either there had to be substantial numbers of Jews and Christians in Mecca or the Koran had to have been composed somewhere else."
Indeed, many scholars who are not revisionists agree that Islam must be placed back into the wider historical context of the religions of the Middle East rather than seeing it as the spontaneous product of the pristine Arabian desert. "I think there is increasing acceptance, even on the part of many Muslims, that Islam emerged out of the wider monotheistic soup of the Middle East," says Roy Mottahedeh, a professor of Islamic history at Harvard University.
Scholars like Mr. Luxenberg and Gerd- R. Puin, who teaches at Saarland University in Germany, have returned to the earliest known copies of the Koran in order to grasp what it says about the document's origins and composition. Mr. Luxenberg explains these copies are written without vowels and diacritical dots that modern Arabic uses to make it clear what letter is intended. In the eighth and ninth centuries, more than a century after the death of Muhammad, Islamic commentators added diacritical marks to clear up the ambiguities of the text, giving precise meanings to passages based on what they considered to be their proper context. Mr. Luxenberg's radical theory is that many of the text's difficulties can be clarified when it is seen as closely related to Aramaic, the language group of most Middle Eastern Jews and Christians at the time.<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->Moses the Egyptian: The Memory of Egypt in Western Monotheism (Amazon Review)
Journal of Near Eastern Studies : For early writers...Moses invented a religious tradition that was the deliberate antithesis of that of Egypt. Later, in the period treated here...they credited Moses with having instructed the Hebrews in a version of Egyptian religion...This is certainly a fascinating work...This account of the theme of Moses the Egyptian should appeal to students of the time period mostly treated here. Moreover...the volume will serve to introduce any number of students of the Near East to several thinkers who were prominent in their own time but not widely known today.
--David Lorton<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
This normative learning configuration is progressing steadily Eastwards. Islam was the next hoax after the Titus affair. But why the Christian hoax was not sufficient to capture the Bedouin Arabs? Augustine inaugurated the middle ages with the doctrine of Divine Will. This was the key to taking out Persians, which Christianity could not do. Augustine was a Carthaginian Manichean.
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->http://eteraz.wordpress.com/2006/05/24/what-is-revisionist-islam/
Mr. Cook and Ms. Crone have revised some of their early hypotheses while sticking to others. "We were certainly wrong about quite a lot of things," Ms. Crone said. "But I stick to the basic point we made: that Islamic history did not arise as the classic tradition says it does."
Ms. Crone insists that the Koran and the Islamic tradition present a fundamental paradox. The Koran is a text soaked in monotheistic thinking, filled with stories and references to Abraham, Isaac, Joseph and Jesus, and yet the official history insists that Muhammad, an illiterate camel merchant, received the revelation in Mecca, a remote, sparsely populated part of Arabia, far from the centers of monotheistic thought, in an environment of idol-worshiping Arab Bedouins. Unless one accepts the idea of the angel Gabriel, Ms. Crone says, historians must somehow explain how all these monotheistic stories and ideas found their way into the Koran.
"There are only two possibilities," Ms. Crone said. "Either there had to be substantial numbers of Jews and Christians in Mecca or the Koran had to have been composed somewhere else."
Indeed, many scholars who are not revisionists agree that Islam must be placed back into the wider historical context of the religions of the Middle East rather than seeing it as the spontaneous product of the pristine Arabian desert. "I think there is increasing acceptance, even on the part of many Muslims, that Islam emerged out of the wider monotheistic soup of the Middle East," says Roy Mottahedeh, a professor of Islamic history at Harvard University.
Scholars like Mr. Luxenberg and Gerd- R. Puin, who teaches at Saarland University in Germany, have returned to the earliest known copies of the Koran in order to grasp what it says about the document's origins and composition. Mr. Luxenberg explains these copies are written without vowels and diacritical dots that modern Arabic uses to make it clear what letter is intended. In the eighth and ninth centuries, more than a century after the death of Muhammad, Islamic commentators added diacritical marks to clear up the ambiguities of the text, giving precise meanings to passages based on what they considered to be their proper context. Mr. Luxenberg's radical theory is that many of the text's difficulties can be clarified when it is seen as closely related to Aramaic, the language group of most Middle Eastern Jews and Christians at the time.<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->Moses the Egyptian: The Memory of Egypt in Western Monotheism (Amazon Review)
Journal of Near Eastern Studies : For early writers...Moses invented a religious tradition that was the deliberate antithesis of that of Egypt. Later, in the period treated here...they credited Moses with having instructed the Hebrews in a version of Egyptian religion...This is certainly a fascinating work...This account of the theme of Moses the Egyptian should appeal to students of the time period mostly treated here. Moreover...the volume will serve to introduce any number of students of the Near East to several thinkers who were prominent in their own time but not widely known today.
--David Lorton<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->