Page 357 - History of The Quranic Text | Kalamullah.Com

ORIENTALIST MOTIVATIONS: A STUDY OF SUBJECTIVITY 337

right forgeries." and to followthe lead of the NT58 in cleansing the Qur'an
of allpassages which were perceived as anti-Semitic.
So long as Muslims hold fast to the Qur'an as Allah's unalterable Word,
this issue of cleansing remains beyond their reach; in this regard Wans-
brough set out to 'prove' that the present Qur'an is no longer solely the
'handiwork of Muhammad,' but in fact of many communities scattered
throughout the Muslim world which developed the text over the course
of two hundred years. 59 Quoting Humphreys:

Wansbrough hopes to establish two major points:
• Islamic scripture - not merely hadith but the Qur'an itself - was
generated in the course of sectarian controversy over a period of
more than two centuries, and then fictitiously projected back onto
an invented Arabian point of origin.
• That Islamic doctrine generally, and even the figure of Muhammad,
were modelled on RabbinicJewish prototype.!"

To this we can append the contemporary work of Yehuda Nevo and
J. Koren, who apply their own revisionist approach to Islamic studies with
the most startling results. Describing archaeological surveys ofJordan and
the Arabian Peninsula, they say that although Hellenistic, Nabataean,
Roman, and Byzantine artefacts have been uncovered, there are no in-
dications of a local Arab culture in the 6th and early 7th centuries C.E.

In particular, no sixth or seventh-century Jahili pagan sites, and no
pagan sanctuaries such as the Muslim sources describe, have been

57 Shortly after Israel's creation, Rev. Prof. Guillaume 'proved' that the al-Masjid
al-Aqsii which Muslims seemed so attached to was in fact in a tiny village on the out-
skirts of Makkah, so very far fromJerusalem! [A. Guillaume, "Where was al-Masyid
al-Aqsa", al-Andalus, Madrid, 1953, pp. 323-336.]
58 See Holy Bible, Contemporary English Version, American Bible Society, New York,
I995;Joseph Blenkinsopp"The Contemporary EnglishVersion:Inaccurate Translation
Tries to Soften Anti:Judaic Sentiment," Bible Review, vol. xii, no. 5, Oct. 1996, p. 42.
In the same issue: Barclay Newman, "CEV's Chief Translator: We Were Faithful to
the Intention of the Text," ibid, p. 43. The extent of these changes ismore far-reaching
than these articlesimply;for examples refer to the full discussionin this work pp. 291-4.
59 Prof. Norman Calder later joined this bandwagon, showing that the literary
works of that period - and not only the Qur'an - were authored by the Muslim
community as a whole. He theorised that the very famous literary works of late 2nd
and 3rd century scholars such as Muioatta' of Imam Malik, al-Mudawwana of Sahnun,
al-Um of ash-Shafi't, al-Kharqj by Abu Yusuf and so on, were scholastic texts not
authored by any single person. [Norman Calder, Studies in EarlyMuslimJurisprudence,
Oxford Univ. Press, 1993].
60 R.S. Humphreys, Islamic History, p. 84.