I was ready to believe Wansborough when I started studying the western academic discourse into the Qur'an. However, I came away convinced that he is wrong. The text is consistent with one composer, someone familiar with "street preaching" of Jews and Christians but not read into the bible, who is subtly altering their story over time, as their relationship to actual communities of Jews and Christians changes. Radiocarbon dating tells us the age of the paper or ink, not the age of the text. There's also the argument about the Hadith, but I won't bore you: the bottom line is they ought to be older too if the Qur'an was older.
It's a very long debate (my own view is that the Qur'an's author is more learned in Biblical monotheism than that), but I'm hoping to get into it here at some point in the next couple of months. This is a piece that was isolated enough to treat on its own.
To be fair, Wansborough also said that "virgins" might be white grapes, and the more I read into the poetry of the peninsula the more viable that seems.
I was ready to believe Wansborough when I started studying the western academic discourse into the Qur'an. However, I came away convinced that he is wrong. The text is consistent with one composer, someone familiar with "street preaching" of Jews and Christians but not read into the bible, who is subtly altering their story over time, as their relationship to actual communities of Jews and Christians changes. Radiocarbon dating tells us the age of the paper or ink, not the age of the text. There's also the argument about the Hadith, but I won't bore you: the bottom line is they ought to be older too if the Qur'an was older.
It's a very long debate (my own view is that the Qur'an's author is more learned in Biblical monotheism than that), but I'm hoping to get into it here at some point in the next couple of months. This is a piece that was isolated enough to treat on its own.
To be fair, Wansborough also said that "virgins" might be white grapes, and the more I read into the poetry of the peninsula the more viable that seems.