Islam as voodoo

Qâric Aramaic - that is, the loanword-glossary - last century was deemed "Nestorian", since it does not observe the Canaanite Shift; but it's been long noted that this could be explained equally by archaism, which also held in the Christian Palaestinian regions. Marijn van Putten at IQSA a few years ago definitively proved that Qâric Aramaic did not even observe begadkepat aspiration - applicable in Arabic script to GDKT. That might be hard to tell with D-v.-Dh or T-v.-Th, since the codices aren't always good at diacritics; but no Arabic scribe will ever mess up K-v.-Kh or G-v.-Gh, unless he were a convert from late-antique Aram himself.

In this light I've read the introduction to Mark Durie's The Qur'an and its Biblical Reflexes. Durie defines "reflex" for us: a deliberately vague subset of "parallel".

Pace Watt, whom Durie laughs offstage, a mortal man (or men, doesn't matter) composed the Quran and did so in the shadow of the Late-Antique Bible. Durie then explains how reflex works in language. Something like French is best understood as the end-stage of centuries of development of an earlier language, in this case Latin. Some points of departure include borrowing, which started very early, as the Roman equestrian gave way to the Celtic cavalier (or chevalier). The reflexes in French, then, are a mix between inheritance (from Latin) and borrowing (German, Celtic, other postLatin languages like Occitan, et c.).

Sometimes the borrowing is extreme, to the point it becomes difficult to see the original. English as of the Battle of Hastings was already highly Dane-inflected; after Hastings, William of Normandy swamped its vocabulary with Latin mainly from his own dialect of French. One might say the same for Sahidic Coptic. You really see this with Grabar Armenian, now deemed a Phrygian offshoot, but for centuries considered Iranian, including by the Iranian shahs.

At the furthest end, Durie points to Creole and Pidgin. He doesn't really make the distinction, but for this book's purpose he might not need to. This is a language of the subordinate class, like English under the Bastard, that near-entirely swaps out its vocabulary. The grammar, however, remains. So Durie will NOT allow Haitian among Romance; it's still West-African. I'll interject here that the ongoing difficulty among linguists where to fit the Proto Germannic in the Indo European tree might reflect an ancient creolisation between the hunter-gatherers of the western Baltic and their (Indo European) Prussian and Gaulish neighbours.

Durie moves on to the religion of Creole speakers, and finds similar swapouts there. As a Catholic convert I can report that the Church allows the Episcopalians, the Lutherans, and even the Baptists as Christians whose baptisms are valid. (We just have to go through the RCIA.) The Church does not, I think, recognise the sacraments of Haitian voodoo. In Haiti are themes of (for a start) divine propitation which the Church anathematises and has never accepted. These themes are African. The religion is African, just given French words. We see the same in Maya villages.

An introduction is not the place to apply this to Islam. It is however a fine place to define the terms and to raise the question, which Durie does: is Islam the Arabs' voodoo? This goes beyond Martin Luther, or Gibbon who scoffed at the Quran's rhapsody of fable. Durie wants to know if Islam is indeed a "heresy", that is a clear offshoot of a known branch of Orthodox Christianity; or a voodoo, some local religion with its top layer swapped out with Judaeo-Christian vocabulary [mostly Aramaic].