Sam Gerrans, Quranites & Petra

Those many people who, not unreasonably, suspect that something is profoundly amiss in contemporary Mahometanism often mistakenly turn to the Koran and try to identify odious passages that supposedly give license to suicide bombers, clitorectomies, beheadings and such other Islam-related atrocities that today populate our news feeds with appalling regularity. They will hold up the Koran, point to nefarious texts, and declare that “the problem starts here!” But in fact, as anyone with more than an outside and partisan view of the religion knows from bitter experience, the problem is not the Koran but rather the secondary sources of Islamic piety, the Hadith. These are the so-called ‘Traditions’ of the Prophet, and the thing that characterizes modern Islam – certainly since the rise of the Wahhabis in Saudi Arabia – is an uncritical adherence to a selected collation of such Traditions to the extent that the Koran is read through that lens. This fact is on full display in the approved Saudi translation of the Koran known as the Hillel edition. Every passage and verse of the Holy Book is explained by reference to one or other of the voluminous Hadith. The Wahhabis are, first and foremost, Hadithists. They elevate the supposed Traditions of Mahomet to the status of pseudo-Scripture and impose them upon the text and meaning of the Holy Writ. The justifications for suicide bombings, female genital mutilation, and so on, are not to be found in the Koran but rather in the Hadith, or else in the Koran as interpreted via the Hadith. The manifestly unhealthy state of contemporary Mahometanism has its roots there, and nowhere else. Accordingly, efforts to correct this state of affairs, and somehow to rouse the Saracens to sensible reform – some practical accommodation with the facts of modernity – must begin there and nowhere else as well.

This, in a fashion, is the agenda of Sam Gerrans. He has rightly gauged that the religion known as ‘Islam’ is primarily a construction of Traditions (Hadith) and is not a simple reflection of the Koran at all. He thus regards it as a “man-made” construction that has been imposed upon – and violates – the actual teachings of the Holy Koran. He is an enthusiast of the actual teachings of the Holy Koran, but not at all fond of the religion known as ‘Islam’. He devotes himself to separating these two things and to promoting a non-Islamic, non-Mahometan, reading of the Arabic Scripture. It is a unique point of view. He calls himself a ‘Quranite’. He has no doubt that the Koran is a divine revelation, but he insists that it has nothing to do with the man-made religion of those he calls Traditionalists, which is to say Hadithists. He dismisses the Hadith literature of the Muslims as hearsay and affords it no authority at all. He offers a reading of the Koran with the lens of the Hadith, and the whole edifice of the Mahometan faith, removed. To this end he has learnt Arabic, acquired a vast understanding of Koranic grammar, and has produced a copiously annotated Islam-free Koran available for free at his website Quranite.com. 

There are other Koran-only Muslims who have rejected the intruding authority of the Hadith literature, but Mr. Gerrans goes further. He does not count himself a “Muslim” at all. He is only a follower and devotee of the Koran - hence "Quranite". He insists that this has no relation to the historic Islamic religion. Unlike Koran-only Muslims, he has no interest in reforming or correcting Islam or in redefining or sanitizing the designation “Muslim”. He has severed the links entirely. He has cut the Gordian knot. He is a “Quranite” pure and simple. He is immersed in and marvels at the revelatory wonders of the Koran but comprehensively rejects anything and everything to do with the “man-made” religion called ‘Islam’.

It is a radical stance. And challenging, and also, as he does it, refreshing. If nothing else, Mr. Gerrens is a determinedly independent thinker. He has, at some point in his life, encountered the Holy Koran – or it has encountered him – and he has relentlessly pursued his own intuitions regarding that sacred text, and – most impressively – he has done so while holding the pervasive mind-set of the Mahometans at bay at every turn. How many others have been able to grapple with the Koran and keep it rigorously separate from the vast structures of institutional Islam? It is surely a feat of great intellectual discipline. One would imagine that if someone is so moved by the Koran that they become convinced it is a divine revelation this would naturally lead them towards some embrace of the Mahometan creed. Many converts to Islam attest that they came to the faith via the Holy Book. But not Mr. Gerrans. Instead, he was struck by how at odds the Mahometan religion is to the plain teachings of the Book. He was moved by the manifest inconsistencies between the practices of the Muslims and the teachings of the Book they purport to cherish. He was able to keep himself intellectually aloof from Islam and its traditions and to just become a devoted student of the Book. It is a noble independence. His work has the integrity of someone who has been able to think outside all the habits of Islamic civilization, and he does so while maintaining cogency and lucidity. Reading Mr. Gerrens’ work offers a new, fresh view of the Koran, throwing new light on a text that even the most occidental orientalist has habitually viewed through Mahometan eyes.

As an example, let us ask: what does the Koran say concerning non-believers and the propagation of the Koranic message? The institutions of jihad, Mr. Gerrens insists, are Hadith-based and not in the least Koranic. Rather, all the Koran proposes is this: that believers share the ‘Warning of the Last Days’ of the Koran with non-believers, urge them to embrace the One God, but then to leave judgment, reward and retribution to God, while authorizing self-defense if believers are subsequently attacked. This is all that a plain reading of the text allows, and nothing more. Other Mahometan institutions, Mr. Gerrens argues, have no Koranic warrant whatsoever. Are dogs unclean? This is entirely a concoction of the Hadith, he says, and has no basis in the Koran. The laws of Halal slaughter? Traditions, but not Koranic. An obsessive prohibition on alcohol? Not Koranic. Gerrens seeks to liberate the Holy Text from the distortions of the Hadith systematically and comprehensively. In an appendix to his translation of the Holy Writ he compares ‘Islam’ with the actual teachings of the Koran. The religion called ‘Islam’, he concludes, is not Koranic – it is essentially Hadithism. If one views the Koran without the distorting lens of the Hadith we arrive at something very different to any traditional form of the Mahometan faith.

This work of Mr. Gerrens deserves a much wider audience, both among Mahometans and others. It has impressive breadth for the work of a self-taught scholar. He engages with the Arabic text at depth and elucidates the finer meanings of the text with painstaking detail. It is the labour of decades, full of insight and intelligence. If nothing else, he offers a great resource to students of the Koran – the Koran seen through rigorously non-Islamic eyes. If one is looking for a fresh view of the Koranic Scripture, this is an excellent place to start. Let us suppose the Koran was not delivered into the cradle of nascent Islam as the traditional narratives would have it. What would it be like then? The‘Quranite’ exercise of Mr. Gerrens is like a view into parallel universe where the Koran exists and yet Islam does not. Given the state of contemporary Islam one can hardly be blamed for finding this position tempting. What if we throw out Islam but keep the Koran? It is a liberating thought.

It is to Mr. Gerran’s credit that his review of the Koran is not motivated by some shallow modernist agenda. There has been a welter of tawdry Korans of late – the feminist Koran, the ecologist Koran, the gay-gender-diversity-transexual Koran, and so on – that try to enlist VIth century Allah to XXIst century social causes. These are uniformly useless where they are not also ludicrous and cringeworthy. The Quranite endeavour is not in that category, thankfully. Mr. Gerran is not out to show how God is a leftist liberal. He seems intent on following his own methodology and on accepting the results whether they agree with modern sensitivities or not. His translation and commentary has the consistency and integrity that so many others lack.

As it happens, however, the present writer feels that the Gerrens strategy goes a little too far. The Hadith literature is, after all, a vast treasure-house in itself – an extensive folklore, deep and profound, a storehouse of traditional wisdom assembled over many centuries and bringing together diverse strands of oral culture. But it should never be allowed to overshadow the Koran. Would it not be possible to put the test of Koranic compatibility to the Hadith literature and to put the Koran first and the Hadith second-most where it belongs? Need we throw out the baby with the bathwater? The real problem, indeed, is not even the Hadith as Mr. Gerrens and other Koran-only advocates propose, but rather the way in which the Hadith literature is used to construct the Shariah and other Mahometan institutions. It need not be used in that way. The problem lies in elevating the Hadith to the status of pseudo-Scripture instead of recognizing it as an oral tradition of beautiful textures, colours and moods but of strictly limited authority. This writer, at least, celebrates the Hadith literature - acknowledging its many blemishes and obvious forgeries - but he understands that one ought never read the Koran through its lens. The relation between that literature and the Holy Book needs clarification. That is a task of outstanding urgency today. 

One aspect of Mr. Gerrens brave adventure into Koranic independence stands out for special comment. He is so keen to divorce the Koran from Mahometanism that he has embraced, somewhat recklessly, the daring archaeological thesis of Mr. Dan Gibson as advanced in the book Quranic Geography. Mr. Gibson has proposed the extraordinary notion that Mahomet and the early Muslims did not live in Mecca but rather in the Nabatean city of Petra. It is proposed that during civil wars in the first century of the Era of the Hijra the Arabs of the Hijaz region transplanted the geography of Mahometan piety from there to Mecca and thereafter Mecca became the place of Islamic pilgrimage and the holy city of the Musselmans. This is, needless to say, a very radical thesis indeed, and accordingly requires a wealth of compelling evidence to support it if it is to be entertained. Incautiously, Mr. Gerrens has embraced this Petra thesis as a whole and one finds reference to it throughout the footnotes and commentary of his Quranite Koran. Incautiously, because on the face of it the thesis of Mr. Gibson is a long stretch and by no account can it be considered even part way demonstrated. This is not to say it is necessarily wrong, but it is far from being proven. 

Gibson offers some enticing arguments for supposing that the Koran was first composed in Petra, not Mecca, but they are not altogether convincing. There is a tendency in secular scholarship nowadays to suggest – or at least to suspect – that perhaps the origins of the Koran did indeed lie westwards of Mecca in Syria and Nabatea. There is a body of (minority) scholarly thought that supposes that the roots of Koranic Arabic are Syrio/Aramaic. The Arabic of the Koran is strange and at odds with that typical of Mecca. And moreover, as many readers of the Koran have long noted, the geographical notices in the Koran do not seem to match Mecca and surrounds. Secular scholars are happy to consider the possibility that the Koran – or the core of the text – was originally composed somewhere other than around Mecca, most likely in the cradle of ancient Judeo-Christian Syria. Petra was once a sacred city of those Arabs. Mr. Gibson joins the dots and, citing various elements of the archaeology of Petra, argues that Petra is a better locus for the origins of the Koran than is Mecca. Mr. Gerrens, eager to distance the Koran from institutional and historic Islam has attached his non-Islamic reading of the Koran to Mr. Gibson’s proposal.

But to do so is surely premature and it adds an unecessary dimension of conjecture and archaelogical speculation to an otherwise rigorous translation of the Koran. It would have been enough for Mr. Gerrens to note that the geography of the Koran is ill-fitting with the known geography of Mecca and to leave it as an open question. Instead, he has settled on the Petra thesis and argues the case for Mr. Gibson from the signals in the Koranic text. This has the effect of removing the text from its familiar Mecca/Medina setting, and Mr. Gerrens obviously enjoys the way in which this loosens and liberates meanings and messages from the accepted and traditional contexts, but it also has the effect of making his translation seem crankish and eccentric in places. He has hitched a very fine labour of translation to a very dubious, or at least questionable, archaeology.  His work is far more solid than that of Mr. Gibson. 

It remains to be seen if the Quranite translation and Mr. Gerren's work attracts a following or whether it just floats around in cyberspace as yet another one-man adventure in speculative Islam. There are many aspects of his work that are unsatisfying. He rejects the classical distinction between early and late surahs (chapters) in the text, for instance, and some of his renderings of familiar vocabulary seems idiosyncratic. It is, after all, Sam Gerren's lifelong encounter with the Holy Koran that is offered to readers, his personal encounter, and so it carries his fingerprints and is blemished with his personal peculiarities. It is not objective and selfless. But it is courageous and bold, and courage and boldness are certainly qualities that the Koranic world - Islamic and otherwise - need in abundance in these very sorry times. Conventional Islam is in a terrible mess. Some bold thinking outside the strictures of traditional or rather Wahhabist Islam is long overdue. 

Yours

Harper McAlpine Black

Lament of the Prophet called God

“Jesus wept.” The shortest sentence in the English Bible. Jesus wept on the Cross. In the fascinating reconstructions of the pseudepigraphal medieval work, the Gospel of Barnabas, however, Jesus is portrayed as weeping in many circumstances; indeed, he is a man of constant sorrow. He weeps for Jerusalem, he weeps for Israel and, in a pivotal episode in chapter 112, he weeps for himself. The effect of the written text is melodramatic rather than tragic, but its author intends to portray Jesus as a tragic prophet, an innocent man entangled in wicked events. 

This is despite the fact that in this gospel it is the traitor Judas Iscariot and not Jesus who is crucified; its central claim is that Jesus escaped the Cross. In other docetic literature this is seen as an occasion for happiness: Jesus is portrayed as looking on at the crucifixion happy and smiling, even laughing. In the medieval Barnabas, however, Jesus regards even his rescue from the ignominy of the Cross as a cause for weeping. Only once, in all 222 chapters, is he portrayed as being pleased. In chapter 127, after the great success of the missions to Judea undertaken by his disciples, he expresses contentment and is able, with his disciples, to rest. Otherwise, he is uniformly dour and tearful, a prophet carrying the immense burden of his prophecies.

The Angel Gabriel comforts him on several occasions but to little effect. The Jewish authorities appeal to the Roman Senate to put an end to dissension about the identity of Jesus: this does not comfort him either. He is still a tragic figure even though Judas dies in his stead and God is revealed as merciful toward the righteous and severe to the unfaithful. The docetic crucifixion does not ease Jesus' discomfiture at all.

The source of this portrait of the suffering (docetic) Jesus is to be found in almost the very centre of the work, chapter 112. Here Jesus confides to Barnabas - "he who writes" as the author describes himself - the cause of his sorrow. The few commentators who have studied the work do not seem to have noted this or to have given it due weight. Alone with "he who writes" Jesus reveals what he calls his "great secrets". In the context of the work as a whole it is an important moment; matters that have only been hinted at earlier are here spelt out in full. It is a key scene. All the scenes in which "he who writes" takes a part are important and signal key themes, but this scene especially so. It is Jesus' most intimate, personal confession to his closest disciple and, arguably, a signature scene revealing to us matters close to the heart of the work's unknown author - assuming that the author identifies himself with the character "he who writes".

More significantly, it is the moment at which this "he who writes" receives his commission to impart Jesus' true teachings to the world - which amounts to authority for the document itself. Jesus is half way through his ministry. He knows what lies ahead. After the disciples and apostles had departed:

There remained with Jesus he who writes; whereupon Jesus, weeping, said: "O Barnabas, it is necessary that I should reveal to you great secrets, which, after that I shall be departed from the world, you shall reveal to it."

Then answered he that writes, weeping, and said: "Suffer me to weep, O master, and other men also, for that we are sinners. And you, that are an holy one and prophet of God, it is not fitting for you to weep so much."

Jesus answered: "Believe me, Barnabas;, that I cannot weep as much as I ought. For if men had not called me God, I should have seen God here as he will be seen in paradise, and should have been safe not to fear the day of judgment. But God knows that I am innocent, because never have I harbored thought to be held more than a poor slave. No, I tell you that if I had not been called God I should have been carried into paradise when I shall depart from the world, whereas now I shall not go thither until the judgment. Now you see if I have cause to weep. Know, O Barnabas, that for this I must have great persecution, and shall be sold by one of my disciples for thirty pieces of money. Whereupon I am sure that he who shall sell me shall be slain in my name, for that God shall take me up from the earth, and shall change the appearance of the traitor so that every one shall believe him to be me; nevertheless, when he dies an evil death, I shall abide in that dishonour for a long time in the world. But when Muhammad shall come, the sacred Messenger of God, that infamy shall be taken away. And this shall God do because I have confessed the truth of the Messiah who shall give me this reward, that I shall be known to be alive and to be a stranger to that death of infamy."

Then answered he that writes: "O master, tell me who is that wretch, for I fain would choke him to death."

"Hold your peace," answered Jesus, "for so God wills, and he cannot do otherwise but see you that when my mother is afflicted at such an event you tell her the truth, in order that she may be comforted."

Then answered he who writes: "All this will I do, O master, if God please."

The first contribution by "he who writes" in this passage is interesting in that it might be taken to reflect a more normative type of doceticism. Jesus is indeed a holy one of God: he should therefore not suffer. This is the basis for the doceticism we know from among the heresies in early Christianity: Jesus is too good to have died by crucifixion. In the docetic mind it is too much to think that God could permit or endorse such a monstrous injustice. It was a powerful objection to Christianity in its early history. What manner of God would allow His Son to suffer the scandal and torture of being crucified? Here "he who writes" believes that it is improper for one so holy as Jesus to weep so much. Weeping is the state of sinners; Jesus is not a sinner; why then should he weep?

The "great secrets" then, are a response to this. Jesus explains why he weeps, why he suffers, even though he is holy. And his answer is in itself extraordinary. Its theological and Christological implications are far-reaching. His answer is - I suffer because I am too holy. This is an idea that finds a place within orthodox Christian themes. It answers docetic formulations with the psychological truism: if God was a man a hateful world would despise Him. This is not a failing of God's justice but rather the way of a fallen world and of a sinful mankind.

Elsewhere in the Gospel of Barnabas we have reproductions of the canonical theme 'the persecution of the prophets'. Prophets, in this work, are persecuted by the world, and this is in the nature of things. The author usually has Ahab and Jezebel’s persecution of Elijah and the "Sons of the Prophet's" in mind, but it is presented as a general principle: prophets suffer persecution. Jesus' own sense of persecution, however, is unique. It happens, in this gospel, that Jesus is so holy that men mistakenly call him God, and in so doing bring upon him the persecution of deification. This is the greatest of the "great secrets" in the Gospel of Barnabas: Jesus weeps because men call him God and - more than that - the deification of him does him violence. The peculiar persecution of Jesus, that is, is that he is so good, possesses so many miraculous powers, displays so many signs, that men worship him and make of him a false god. This tragic irony is the keynote to the Gospel of Barnabas' picture of the weeping Jesus.

The consequences of this are wide and are explored throughout this work. While God knows full well that Jesus is an innocent man, the fact that men have made of him a false god has unavoidable repercussions. Jesus, it seems, was a prophet of such high station that he could have attained the paradisiacal vision in his lifetime. Instead, because men had called him God, and despite his innocence, he must, tragically, be deprived this supreme vision until the end of time.

While Jesus is no less deserving of this supreme vision, the fact that men have made of him a god in some way links him to their fate: he must wait until the Judgment and until those who have deified him have received their proper reward. There is the suggestion, too, perhaps, that as a Prophet Jesus was indeed god-like, and that deification was a hazard inherent in his mission. When Peter, at one point, says that Jesus is God, Jesus curses him and prays that he be sent to hell for saying and believing so. At another point Jesus bangs his head on the ground in anger and frustration at what people believe and say of him. He spends a good part of his ministry trying to dispel the false claims being made about who and what he is. In what is surely a strange and oblique presentation of the Jewish War, the identity of Jesus causes sedition and upheaval in Judea. 

In one sense, in the Gospel of Barnabas, his identity is his mission and his message; what he teaches is not as challenging as the question of who he is. Because men call him God, he is withheld from God, or, more exactly, men who are withheld from God withhold him. He is not free of them until they receive their justice. Although it is not explicit in this passage, this doctrine conforms to what the Muslim inspired Gospel of Barnabas has to say about idols and idolatry. In effect, people treat Jesus as an idol, an object of shiirk. He suffers because of this.

The present author has reframed Jesus' speech in chapter 112 as a lament, the lament of the prophet called God:

If men had not called me God

I would have seen God here as in paradise.

If men had not called me God
I should have been safe not to fear the Day of Judgment.

God knows that in my heart I am innocent.

I am naught but His poor slave.

Now thou seest if I have cause to weep.

If men had not called me God

I should have been transported to the Gardens of Bliss

when I depart from this world.

Now I shall not know paradise until the Last Day.

Great is my persecution! since men have called me God.

Now thou seest if I have cause to weep.

God knows that I am innocent of heart.

He shall take me up from the earth

and have the traitor slain in my name.

But if men had not called me God

God should not give him my face

and my likeness in an evil death.

Now thou seest if I have cause to weep.

If men had not called me God

I should not have to abide in dishonour

and await the Comforter who shall remove the infamy.

I have confessed the truth of the one who is to come.

Only he shall restore my name.

Only then shall I be known to be alive

and a stranger to that evil death.
Men have made of me an idol.

This is surely the greatest persecution
the Prophets of God can know.

Now thou seest if I have cause to weep.

It is a cunning twist of Mahometan Christology. The important point to note is that Jesus' final solace - the vision of Paradise - is postponed because men called him God. In this perspective – the core message of this heterodox medieval work - to call Jesus God does him lasting spiritual violence. In the medieval Barnabas he is spared the injustice of the Cross – although Judas is given his appearance and so the world at large attributes this vile fate to him, a slander that persists until the ‘Comforter’ (Paraclete) comes to expose the error – but the unique form of persecution he suffers among all the persecuted prophets is to be deified by a wickedly idolatrous world.

Yours,

Harper McAlpine Black

On Thomas McElwain

Dr. Thomas McElwain rarely contributes to religious debate these days, since he feels – with much justification – that we live in contentious times and public engagement merely invites rancor and hatred. It is a great pity, though, because he offers a unique voice and a fresh, unusual perspective. The present writer is drawn to Dr. McElwain’s work on several counts, but largely because he is a living embodiment of the overlap between certain strains of Protestant Christianity and the Mahometan faith. In previous posts (see here) this author has outlined his conviction that the Protestant Reformation was a type of Christian response, or realignment, to the pressing fact of Islam, most specifically – in historic terms – to the pressure of Turkish Islam upon central Europe in the 1500s. But the links between Protestantism and Mahometanism go deeper than historic mechanisms. They extend into early Christianity and, in principle, to the roots of the entire Abrahamic religious complex. This is the view, and even more the experience, of Dr. McElwain, who has devoted most of his adult life to the exploration and explication of exactly such roots.

On the surface he is an odd mix. He was raised as a Seventh Day Adventist in the southern states of the USA, with strong, unavoidable exposure to the Baptist tradition. Through both his grandparents, maternal and paternal, however, he was familiar with a stream of Unitarian Quakerism which, remarkably, was linked to the Alevi Soofi tradition of Asia Minor. His grandfathers wore turbans and revered the Twelve Imams of the Shia. Add to this a deep backwoods acquaintance with certain tribes of American Indians, their languages and their traditions, and the fact that he has lived for years in a remote snow-bound cottage in Finland converting Biblical and Koranic texts into rhymed verse and we can surely, in all fairness, state that Dr. Elwain has trod an unconventional road. He describes himself thus: “I’m sort of a Quaker hard-shell Baptist Sufi who has practiced Islam.” By his own account he is a follower of a certain Mr. Edward Elwall, who he counts as his intellectual mentor, a turban-clad English Unitarian Quaker who lived in the early 1700s and who belonged to a Turkish order of dervishes. Dr. McElwain is, in short, a southern American scholar in far north Scandanavia, a Biblical Christian with Shia Islamic Turko-Soofi affiliations.

This all makes him a fascinating character. Many would say eccentric – but that designation would allow his work and viewpoint to be too easily dismissed since it implies outlandish. In fact, Dr. McElwain is a thorough and very learned scholar whose teachings are founded in a deep study of languages, and at their centre is a simple but profound notion. He regards the Decalogue – the Mosaic Ten Commandments – to be the core of the Abrahamic tradition, and he reads all three Abrahamic faiths, Judaism, Christianity and Islam, through that singular lens. Not, however, by the usual legalistic and moral reading, but rather by an esoteric reading that emphasizes the fact that the Decalogue is the single-most direct revelation given by the Almighty in any of the vast literature of these three great traditions. Direct, that is, meaning unmediated by angels or other representatives. The Koran, for instance, is mediated by the Angel Jibreel. The Gospels come to us through the authority of the Apostles. But the Decalogue, the revelation of Sinai, is a direct and forthright encounter with the Divine where God speaks and reveals His law without mediation (except the Burning Bush.)

This scriptural fact, Dr. Elwain has argued throughout his career, has been lost in the messy overgrowth of religious tradition. He has devoted his studies to reasserting the centrality of the Decalogue both within the Abrahamic traditions and, importantly, between them. The Mahometan tradition, for instance, has, he argues, lost sight of the fact that it is Moses – the Prophet Moosa – who is the central character in the Koran, and that at every turn the Koran reiterates the Decalogue as the essence of Allah’s will. The present author – let it be admitted – has had the experience, years ago now, of scoffing at this assertion, only to be shaken out of his complacency when he checked and rechecked Koranic texts according to the McElwain reading and discovering that the good Doctor is absolutely correct. Thomas McElwain is a very astute and careful reader of both Bible and Koran – and pseudepigrapha as well – and his reading and cross-reading of those texts is always perspicacious and penetrating.

For reasons best known to himself, he has chosen to present much of his work in the form of rhyming verse; it is an idiosyncrasy, certainly, and yet, perhaps, it preserves his thought from the straight-jacket of academic stultifications. This can only be applauded.

Unfortunately, he occupies that terrible no-man’s-land between the warring ideologies of the Christians and the Saracens. As he himself relates, his work on the Koran alienates his Christian friends and his work on the Bible alienates his Muslim friends. We live, as he says, in an age of renewed polarization. Indeed, this new atmosphere of mutual conflict has, over just the last few years, infected the once ‘moderate’ and Europe-looking world of Turkish Islam and the plight of the Alevi Mahometans in Turkish society has worsened considerably in recent times as Shia/Sooni sectarianism once again rips open the Muslim Ummah. Dr. McElwain’s work of eucemenical cross-fertilization, that is, – always in the left-field - is even less welcome in the public sphere than in the past.

Readers will find his name prominent in a vicious on-line attack upon the Dawoodiyya Soofi Order, – that Order being a beautiful inspiration, structured around the McElwain vision, celebrating the Psalms of David in the (Turkish) Soofi mode. Certain figures have seen fit to throw as much mud at the Doctor as they can. It is not surprising that he has withdrawn from this environment of hostility. There is only a certain amount of misunderstanding, abuse and derision a soft-spoken, sincere and warm-hearted scholar can take.

Another point in favor of Dr. McElwain, from this present author’s point of view, is his insistence that the medieval Gospel of Barnabas – one of the strangest works of Christian apochrypha – is, when removed from the context of Christian/Mahometan polemic, a work of spiritual power. This author has been a student of the said ‘Muslim Gospel’ for several decades. Much of his academic work has concerned a careful investigation into its origins and provenance, as well as inter-textual studies of its relation to New Testament and other gospels. Beyond that, however, it is – though it is rarely acknowledged as such – a work of great spiritual merit. Its merit lies in its extraordinary synthesis of all three Abrahamic perspectives. In practice, it manages to offend Jews, Christians and Mahometans, but there is a higher viewpoint that goes beyond such narrow confessional particularisms and in which this fact becomes a shining virtue.

In contemporary academic circles, it seems only Dr McElwain (along with the present author) recognize this. Regardless of how the Gospel of Barnabas came into being – and the present author is firmly of the view that its roots and some sections of the extant text are of considerable antiquity – it offers a Judeo-Christian-Islamo synthesis that is both unique and profound. Whoever composed the Gospel of Barnabas, they transcended the limitations of age-old religious divisions and attained a higher synthetic viewpoint. Dr. McElwain has devoted his career to doing much the same. The author counts him, for this reason and others, as something of a kindred spirit.

Dr. McElwain's rhymed verse renderings and commentary on Biblical and Koranic texts can be found under the title 'Beloved and I'. His most academic work can be found in the volume entitled 'Islam in the Bible'.

The present author’s work on the Gospel of Barnabas can be found here.


Yours,

Harper McAlpine Black