Muslims -- and religion writers -- will want to ponder these quotations:
“There is not much reason to place a great deal of confidence in the Islamic tradition’s account of the Quran’s origins” in light of “the bewildering confusion and complexity” of early Muslim memories about this. Yes, “at least some, and perhaps much” of the holy book does have roots in the Prophet Muhammad’s actual preaching career in Arabia.
However, the book as Muslims know it is a “composite and composed text” that was “altered significantly” and “reimagined, rewritten, and augmented” during a half-century or so after the Prophet’s lifetime and finally standardized under Damascus-based Caliph Abd al-Malik (685–705 CE).
What Muslim tradition tells us about Muhammad’s career may contain factual “nuggets” but much of it is “little more than pious fiction” with “no basis in any genuine historical memories.”
There could be trouble. All that will certainly offend believers in the orthodox view that between 610 and his death in 632, Muhammad, guided by the angel Gabriel, received God’s verbatim words, memorized them, dictated them to scribes, and confirmed the entirety of the Quran’s revelations as they exist today.
This sort of dispute will be familiar to educated Christians, since similar western “historical criticism” or “higher criticism” has been aimed at their New Testament for 200 years.
Now that outlook is being applied to Islam’s holy book in “Creating the Quran.” Author Stephen J. Shoemaker, a prolific scholar of Christian and Muslim origins at the University of Oregon, asserts that experts have been too timid or reverential in promoting a revisionist viewpoint.
“Creating” was published last July but languished in academic obscurity until Baylor University historian Philip Jenkins boosted it as an eye-opener in a recent Patheos.com article. The University of Chicago’s Fred Donner blurbs that this is “a milestone in Quranic studies” and “the most comprehensive and convincing examination” of the issues currently available.
