Objections to Luxenberg:
My first and main objection to this approach is not that it does not yield results. My main objection is that it yields far too many results. My second objection is that, for Luxenberg, everything happens in the realm of orthography and reading. This disregards the important role that recitation played in the preservation of the Qurʾanic text. My third objection is that there is no attempt to explain how the actual wording of the text could have arisen out of “errors” and “misunderstandings.” And my fourth and last objection is that there is little evidence for an Aramaic-Arabic “mixed language” spoken in Mecca in the seventh century ce.
If we unlock the door of imaginable Arabic readings for the Qurʾanic letters, traditionally read as bi-ḥūrin ʿīn, we find that the first graphic cluster bi-ḥūr alone allows for numerous homographs: bi-ḥawar (“in a white poplar”), bi-jawr (“with injustice”), bi-juwar (“in pits”), bijiwarr (“in a rainshower”), bi-jawz (“with walnuts”), bi-ḥawz (“by acquisition”), bi-khawar (“in weakness”), etc. These different readings demand different contexts. For the preceding word wa-zawwajnāhum (Q 44:54 and 52:20) as an isolated word in its ʿUthmānic rasm, the following possibilities exist: wa-rawwajnāhum (“and we made them saleable”), and wa-rawwaḥnāhum (“and we perfumed them”). Luxenberg prefers the reading wa-rawwaḥnāhum, but translates “we made it comfortable for them,” although this meaning is not attested in Classical Arabic. Moreover, the defective writing of zwjnhm (first person plural) can be interpreted as a first person singular, a second person masculine singular, a second person female singular, and a third person female plural verb in the perfect. If the whole context is in doubt, it becomes very difficult to decide. All this presupposes that the initial b- in fact corresponds to the Arabic preposition bi-, and not to the first consonant of an Arabic or Aramaic root. This, of course, is also open to doubt. Since Luxenberg views the whole context to be open to radical questioning of this kind, there is practically no context left to be trusted. Moreover, according to Luxenberg, the mixed Arabo-Aramaic language of the pre-Qurʾan postulated by him adheres neither to the rules of Arabic nor to those of Aramaic morphology and syntax. The multitude of possible “interpretations” therefore increases, whereas the criteria to decide between them become fewer and fewer. Even further variants are generated when we permit ourselves, as Luxenberg does, to transpose the Arabic rasm into Syriac and to allow for almost limitless misunderstandings, misreadings and mistakes on the way and back. Unhampered by any context, we are drowned in a sea of possibilities.
Luxenberg’s main argument against the houris, however, was not the obscurity of the passages in which they occur. Luxenberg’s hypothesis of a mixed Arabo-Aramaic language as having constituted the original language of the Qurʾan is demonstrably highly improbable.
