Günter Lüling (25 October 1928 – 10 September 2014) was a German Protestant theologian, philological scholar (Dr. in Arabistics and Islamics) and pioneer in the study of early Islamic origins. From 1962 to 1965 he was the Director of the German Goethe-Institut in Aleppo, Syria.
According to Alan Dundes, in 1970 Luling submitted a doctoral dissertation which suggested that the Quran "contained evidence of traces of poetic strophic" (i.e. verse-repeating or chorus form, .. a song structure in which all verses or stanzas of the text are sung to the same music, as opposed to "through-composed" where new music written for every stanza) texts. Dundes writes that Lüling's view was "not in accord with orthodox Islamic tradition", and by 1972, "he was officially dismissed" from the University of Erlangen, where he had submitted his thesis. A lawsuit filed to overturn the dismissal carried on for six years but "did not succeed in reversing the university's action". This original Doctoral thesis was subsequently published in a book which he could not get published in the west and eventually was published in India.
Video Title: Why are Muslims TERRIFIED of Dr Luling? Source: PfanderFilms. Date Published: September 22, 2022. Description:
This book was Dr Gunter Luling's doctoral thesis, written in Germany in 1970. He looked at much of the beautiful poetry in the Qur'an, and found that these poems had all been borrowed from 4th - 6th century Christian Hymns, written in Syro-Aramaic, and then interposed into Arabic by removing the Syriac diacritical marks and replacing them with Arabic diacritical marks, and then finally incorporating the text into the Qur'an sometime in the 8th century, or later.
That is why the poetry is so beautiful! It didn't come from Muhammad or even from Allah at all, but from the Christian writers who wrote them, all before the 7th century.
This discovery understandably is dangerous for Muslims, because it proves that much of the Qur'an cannot be attributed to God (see Surah 15:9), nor to any eternal tablets in heaven (see Surah 85:21-22), and certainly not to any man named Muhammad in the 7th century, but were hymns simply borrowed from earlier Christian writers, translated into Arabic, and then included in the Qur'an.
His 1970 PhD thesis received an ‘Eximium Opus’ grade, the highest grade available in Germany, which should have promoted him to professorship in any German university he chose.
But instead, in 1972, he was kicked out of his University, yet given no reason (some say today it was because ‘He was a crack-pot’, though they don't explain what they mean), and he and his wife were thrown into obscurity, and lived on welfare for 30 years.
That was when I met him in Germany, and took his thesis, helped get it translated into English, whereupon he then had it published in India (the only country that would publish his book), which subsequently made it available for the rest of the world to read.
Due to this English rendering of his thesis, Dr Luling was brought back out of obscurity and into academia, as people finally realized just what a breakthrough his research really was, and he died in 2014 a happy man.
Dr Günter Lüling's 1970's Doctoral Thesis on finding Christian hymns incorporated throughout the Qur'an has been a breakthrough research, Yet, it cost him his career as he was forced out of academia by Dr Spitaler, and into obscurity, until we got it translated into English, so that the whole world could see and read it for themselves.