Kamal Salibi

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Kamal Salibi (July 2009)

Kamal Suleiman Salibi ( Arabic كمال الصليبي, DMG Kamāl aṣ-Ṣalībī ; * May 2, 1929 in Beirut ; † September 1, 2011 ibid) was a Lebanese historian .

Life

Salibi comes from a Christian-Lebanese family . He studied history in Beirut, received his doctorate in London in 1953 and finally became professor of history and archeology at the American University in Beirut. Until 2004 he was director of the Royal Jordanian Institute for Interreligious Studies in Amman .

Jerusalem thesis

In addition to numerous publications on standard historical topics, his work "The Bible Came From The Land Of Asir" attracted lively attention and fierce criticism. In it he considers it possible that the ancient Jerusalem of the Old Testament in the time before the Babylonian exile (586 to 537 BC) was not in the land of Canaan (today Israel and Palestinian Autonomous Areas ), but instead in the southwestern Arabian region of Asir (today Saudi Arabia ) could have been. This is where Moses once led the Hebrews out of Egyptian bondage , and there Solomon built the temple in al-Sharim (Old Jerusalem). (Al-Sarim or LSRM is an arabized sound shift / metathesis of RSLM or Jerusalem.) Only after the Jewish liberation from Babylonian captivity was a New Jerusalem built in Palestine instead of the destroyed and ruined Old Jerusalem in Asir.

Salibi based his thesis primarily on his studies of place names. According to his information, in Asir he found not only Western Arabic place names and geographical names, but above all Canaanite, Aramaic and Hebrew place names that correspond to the Old Testament. Transferred to Western Arabia, according to Salibi, 80% of the 700 or so distance information and descriptions of the landscape of the biblical places fit with one another significantly better than the interpretation based on the geography of Palestine. The magazine Der Spiegel dealt extensively with this theory in 1985.

Salibi's thesis met with rejection in the professional world. In addition to methodological errors in the area of ​​linguistic theses, the failure to observe archeology was also criticized. However - in contrast to the targeted and less open-ended "Bible archeology" in Palestine - no archaeological excavations were carried out (in Asir) to check Salibi's thesis.

Salibi on the Koran

Salibi, himself a Christian, has repeatedly assured that he is not interested in a religious and substantive reassessment of political claims or even a reinterpretation of the Bible, just long overdue historical and geographical adjustments in the face of overwhelming new findings.

According to Salibi's conclusions, the Koran should also be reorganized. According to Salibi, it is neither a mutilated form of the Bible, as non-Muslims claim, nor a later correction of it, revealed to Mohammed by God, as Muslims believe, but a parallel Western Arabic version of the Hebrew-Aramaic Old Testament.

“Where the Koran tells biblical stories, it does not simply bring biblical material in a mutilated form, as is generally accepted in research today. Its contents, where they correspond to the Hebrew Bible (apart from the Christian Gospel here), are independent versions of the same Western Arabic historical traditions and must be treated as such. If the Bible represents the Israelite Hebrew version of this tradition from times before the fourth century BC, the Koran, where it deals with the same traditions, represents the Arabic version ... ”(The Bible came ..., p. 50)

Fonts

In English
In German

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Lebanon: Historian Kamal Salibi died in Beirut , zenithonline.de, September 1, 2011, accessed on September 3, 2011
  2. ↑ Der Spiegel 38/1985 of September 16, 1985: Is the Bible not right after all? (Part One)
  3. ↑ Der Spiegel 39/1985 of September 23, 1985: Isn't the Bible right after all? (Part II)
  4. ↑ Der Spiegel 40/1985 of September 30, 1985: Isn't the Bible right after all? (Part II)
  5. ↑ See for example Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (ed.), Ein Bücher-Tagebuch. Book reviews from the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung , Frankfurt 1986, pp. 551f; Alfred Felix Landon Beeston , in: Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society 154 (1988), pp. 389-93; W. Sibley Towner, in: Middle East Journal 42 (1988), pp. 511-513.
  6. ↑ Federal Agency for Civic Education of April 6, 2018: Excavations as a political issue. Biblical Archeology and the City of David Project
  7. ↑ Walter-Jörg Langbein : Lexicon of Biblical Errors , page 77. Langen Mueller Herbig, Munich 2003
personal data
SURNAME Salibi, Kamal
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Salibi, Kamal Suleiman (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Lebanese historian
DATE OF BIRTH May 2, 1929
PLACE OF BIRTH Beirut
DATE OF DEATH September 1, 2011
Place of death Beirut