What the Koran Really Says: Language, Text and Commentary (2002) is the title of a book edited and translated by Ibn Warraq

Ibn Warraq

Ibn Warraq is the pen name of a polemical author of Pakistani origin who is critical of Islam, and who founded the Institute for the Secularisation of Islamic Society . He is a senior research fellow at the Center for Inquiry focusing on Qur'anic criticism...

 and published by Prometheus Books

Prometheus Books

Prometheus Books is a publishing company founded in August 1969 by Paul Kurtz, who also founded the Council for Secular Humanism and co-founded the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry. He is currently the chairman of all three organizations. Prometheus Books publishes a range of books, including many...

. The book is a collection of classical essays, some translated for the first time, that provide commentary on the traditions and language of the Koran, discussing its grammatical and logical discontinuities, its Syriac and Hebrew foreign vocabulary, and its possible Christian

Christian

A Christian is a person who adheres to Christianity, an Abrahamic, monotheistic religion based on the life and teachings of Jesus of Nazareth as recorded in the Canonical gospels and the letters of the New Testament...

, Coptic and Qumranic sources.

Within the book is an article written by Gerd R. Puin

Gerd R. Puin

Gerd Rüdiger Puin is a German scholar and an authority on Qur'anic historical orthography, the study and scholarly interpretation of ancient manuscripts. He is also specialist in Arabic paleography...

 titled "Observations on Early Qu'ran Manuscripts in Sana'a". Professor Puin is a German scholar and an authority on Qur'anic historical orthography

Orthography

The orthography of a language specifies a standardized way of using a specific writing system to write the language. Where more than one writing system is used for a language, for example Kurdish, Uyghur, Serbian or Inuktitut, there can be more than one orthography...

, the study and scholarly interpretation of ancient manuscripts, and a specialist in Arabic calligraphy. Professor Puin was the head of a restoration project, commissioned by the Yemeni government, which spent a significant amount of time examining the ancient Qur'anic manuscripts discovered in Sana'a, Yemen

Yemen

The Republic of Yemen , commonly known as Yemen , is a country located in the Middle East, occupying the southwestern to southern end of the Arabian Peninsula. It is bordered by Saudi Arabia to the north, the Red Sea to the west, and Oman to the east....

, in 1972. In Mr. Warraq's book, Professor Puin has written:

"My idea is that the Qur’an is a kind of cocktail of texts that were not all understood even at the time of Muhammad. Many of them may even be a hundred years older than Islam itself. The Qur’an claims for itself that it is ‘mubeen’, or clear. But [contrary to popular belief] if you look at it, you will notice that every fifth sentence or so simply does not make sense…the fact is that a fifth of the Qur’anic text is just incomprehensible. If the Qur’an is not comprehensible, if it can’t even be understood in Arabic, then it’s not translatable into any language. That is why Muslims are afraid. Since the Qur’an claims repeatedly to be clear but is not - there is an obvious and serious contradiction. Something else must be going on".

Contributing writers

Other writers who have contributed to Ibn Warraq

Ibn Warraq

Ibn Warraq is the pen name of a polemical author of Pakistani origin who is critical of Islam, and who founded the Institute for the Secularisation of Islamic Society . He is a senior research fellow at the Center for Inquiry focusing on Qur'anic criticism...

's book include:

Toby Lester

Yehuda D. Nevo

Yehuda D. Nevo

Yehuda D. Nevo b. 1932 was a Middle Eastern archeologist living in Israel. He died after a long battle with cancer in 1992.Nevo discovered Kufic inscriptions in the Negev desert in Israel, four hundred of which were published in Ancient Arabic Inscriptions from the Negev...

Alphonse Mingana

Alphonse Mingana

Alphonse Mingana; was an Assyrian theologian, historian, Syriacist, orientalist and a former priest who is best known for collecting and preserving the Mingana Collection of ancient Middle Eastern manuscripts at Birmingham...

D. S. Margoliouth

Paul E. Kahle

Paul E. Kahle

Paul Ernst Kahle was a German orientalist and scholar.He was born in East Prussia and studied orientalism and theology in Marburg. He attained his doctorate in 1898. He was a Lutheran pastor. He studied semitic philology in Cairo between 1908 and 1918...

C. Rabin

Joshua Blau

A. Ben-Shemesh

Eric R. Bishop

Marc Philonenko

Wilson B. Bishai

Raimund Kobert

Franz Rosenthal

Franz Rosenthal

Franz Rosenthal was the Louis M. Rabinowitz professor of Semitic languages at Yale from 1956 to 1967 and Sterling Professor Emeritus of Arabic, scholar of Arabic literature and Islam at Yale from 1967 to 1985....

Claude Cahen

Claude Cahen

Claude Cahen was a French Marxist orientalist and historian. He specialized in the studies of the Islamic Middle Ages, Muslim sources about the Crusades, and social history of the medieval Islamic society ....

Meir M. Bravmann

M.J. Kister

Uri Rubin

Uri Rubin

Uri Rubin a Professor in the Department of Arabic and Islamic Studies at the Tel-Aviv University in Israel. His areas of research are early Islam, with special emphasis on Qur'an, Qur'an Exegesis , and early Islamic tradition .Prof...

C. Heger

Michael Schub

J. Barth

A. Fischer

C.C. Torrey

James A. Bellamy

Richard Bell

Rudolf Geyer

Julius Wellhausen

Julius Wellhausen

Julius Wellhausen , was a German biblical scholar and orientalist, noted particularly for his contribution to scholarly understanding of the origin of the Pentateuch/Torah ....

Ibn Rawandi

Adolf Grohmann

Gerd R. Puin

Gerd R. Puin

Gerd Rüdiger Puin is a German scholar and an authority on Qur'anic historical orthography, the study and scholarly interpretation of ancient manuscripts. He is also specialist in Arabic paleography...

Reviews

In his review of the book, As'ad AbuKhalil

As'ad AbuKhalil

As'ad AbuKhalil Arabic: أسعد أبو خليل is a Lebanese-American professor of political science at California State University, Stanislaus....

states that Ibn Warraq collected old writings by Orientalists who have been long discredited and added that "the more rigid and biased the Orientalists, the better for Warraq".