Yehuda Nevo

Yehuda D. Nevo ( 1932 -  February 12, 1992 ) was an Israeli archaeologist.

research

Nevo was a contributor to the Negev Archaeological Project: Early Arab Period. The Rural Settlement in the Negev in the 6th-8th centuries AD, directed by the Institute of Archeology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in Israel . In 1981 he and his research group discovered several hundred rock inscriptions in the Arabic language in the Negev desert in Israel, near Sede Boqer , written in the primitive Kufi style . Yehuda Nevo presented the first results of the project mentioned at the 3rd International Colloquium: From Jahiliyya to Islam (June 30 to July 6, 1985): Yehuda D. Nevo: Sde Boqer and the Central Negev. 7th-8th Century AD . The work was published as a special edition for the colloquium. He then published his further interpretations of the finds in Sede Boqer in his article Towards a Prehistory of Islam (1994).

Further results have been published with Zemira Cohen and Dalia Heftman in Ancient Arabic inscriptions from the Negev . The published finds from 1981–1982 and 1986–1988 formed the basis for questioning the origins of Islam and early Islamic history. Nevo thus belongs to the revisionist school of Islamic studies .

In his book Crossroads to Islam: The Origins of the Arab Religion and the Arab State , which he wrote together with the librarian Judith Koren, he presents a theory about the origins and development of the Islamic state and the Islamic religion. He fundamentally doubts the historicity of the classical Islamic traditions about the early days of Islam. In his opinion, the Arabs were still pagans when they conquered the Middle East. They took over the Judeo-Christian monotheism of the peoples they had conquered, and later formed an independent religion from it. In this way, the stories about Mohammed and the Koran are believed to be completely untrue. This strong skepticism led to heavy criticism from other historians.

He also published some of his work in the book The Quest for the Historical Muhammad , edited by Ibn Warraq .

In the book The Dark Beginnings , edited by Karl-Heinz Ohlig , Nevo's approaches are continued.

Criticism of Nevos research

In a review of the book Ancient Arabic inscriptions from the Negev, the German orientalist Werner Diem pointed out various errors in the transcription and criticized the translation of individual words; he is of the opinion that "in spite of certain philological shortcomings the volume is a substantial contribution to the field of early Arabic epigraphy with important new material concerning paleography, orthography and language". At the same time, Diem points out that some Qur'anic verses in the inscriptions were not recognized as those that should have been summarized in a concordance, because: "If all Qurʾānic quotations and references had been identified by the editors and collected in a concordance, Nevo's judgment about the number of Qurʾānic expressions in the inscriptions would probably have been different. "

Works

• Crossroads to Islam: The Origins of the Arab Religion and the Arab State , Yehuda D. Nevo and Judith Koren, Prometheus Books, Amherst, NY, 2003, ISBN 1-59102-083-2
• Ancient Arabic inscriptions from the Negev , edited by Yehuda D. Nevo, Zemira Cohen, Dalia Heftman, IPS, Negev, Israel, 1993, ISBN 965-435-001-7
• Pagans and herders: a re-examination of the Negev runoff cultivation systems in the Byzantine and early Arab periods , Yehuda D. Nevo, IPS, Negev, Israel, 1991, ISBN 965-435-000-9
• Towards a Prehistory of Islam . In: Jerusalem Studies in Arabic and Islam. 1994, 17: 108-141

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Printed by Israel Publications Services. Jerusalem 1985. 51 pages with numerous illustrations.
2. ↑ In: Jerusalem Studies in Arabic and Islam 19 (1995), p. 287
3. ↑ In: Jerusalem Studies in Arabic and Islam 19 (1995), p. 286