Excerpts from The Rushdie Affair: The Novel, the Ayatollah, and the West, Books and Documents, NewAgeIslam.com

Books and Documents

Excerpts from The Rushdie Affair: The Novel, the Ayatollah, and the West

Although Grenier did receive some late-night callers whispering “Death to the enemies of Allah,” no governments banned his book or called for his murder. WT 15 Feb

As for scholarship, nothing could challenge Islam more completely than two books published in 1977. John Wansbrough’s Quranic Studies makes the following points about the Qur’an: that it was written by many human hands (and not by God); that the compilation took place over a period lasting perhaps as long as three and a half centuries (rather than twenty-two years); that the authors drew on many cultural traditions, especially the Jewish; and that Muhammad was merely a prophet figure—real or imaginary, it hardly matters—who had nothing at all to do with the composition of the Qur’an (rather than being its sole source).[2]

Drawing on Wansbrough’s efforts, Hagarism, a historical study by Patricia Crone and Michael Cook, ignores information on Muhammad and the Qur’an deriving from the standard sources—the Arabic literary accounts. Instead, the authors rely entirely on Aramaic, Armenian, Coptic, Greek, Hebrew, Latin and Syriac sources, as well as Arabic papyri, coins and inscriptions. 259-60 This re-examination leads Crone and Cook to turn the normal account of Islam’s origins upside-down. In their version, Muhammad was not elevated “to the role of a scriptural prophet” until the year a.d. 700 or so, seventy years after his death;[3] and the Qur’an was compiled only under the auspices of al-Hajjaj ibn Yusuf, the governor of Iraq in 694-714. EI2 3 To put it mildly, these assertions are at odds with what Muslims believe. Although Wansbrough, Crone and Cook raised a small tempest in academic circles, their books, with the implied charge that Islam was a fraud from the first, were altogether ignored by Muslims.

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