SPIEGEL ONLINE: Your scholarship focuses on the early period of Islam and the Koran. What is the evidentiary situation? How could we prove that the Prophet lived?
Marx: You have to be a bit delicate about it. In general, when it comes to history, you can't point to any scientific proof. How would we, for example, prove the existence of Charlemagne? We can't conduct any experiments; we have to work with evidence. And, for this issue, the evidentiary thread is the Koran. In this case, the evidentiary situation is better than it is for any other religion. We know of manuscripts of the Koran and Islamic inscriptions already 40-50 years after the Prophet died. It would be hard to explain the Koran, if you took the prophet out of the equation. Ohlig claims that Islam was actually a Christian sect up until the Umayyad Caliphate, that is, the eighth century. In this case, I run into this massive issue: It doesn't match up with the text of the Koran. Why isn't Christ a more central figure in the Koran, then? You hear about Abraham, Moses and Noah much more frequently.
SPIEGEL ONLINE: And what about with the format of the Koran?
Marx: That's the second evidentiary thread. As can be shown in even linguistic terms, the Koran is a kind of speech. It isn't a narration like the New Testament, a piece of correspondence like the epistles of Paul, an account of the Apocalypse or a Psalm. The genre only makes sense when I have a person that I can attach it to -- a charismatic orator, a prophet. Why would a community that doesn't have a prophet invent one after the fact and make up a text, which is then also Christian, as Ohlig sees it? Ohlig's thesis is uneconomical; it raises more issues than it solves.
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6:11 AM
Moderate Islamist here
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